


Out of Time

by ibroketuesday



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Age Swap, Amnesiac Bucky Barnes, Body Swap, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, M/M, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Past Abuse, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Psychological Torture, Suicidal Thoughts, Time Travel, Torture, Touch-Starved, flaying, please note the explicit rating is for torture not porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-08-11 22:56:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 38,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7910809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ibroketuesday/pseuds/ibroketuesday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky can't remember anything before Hydra. He doesn't want to know about his life. That's the way it has to be: Bucky Barnes was a monster, and the past is in the past.</p><p>Or: in which Steve and Bucky are thrown back to 1937, where they have to figure out how to get home, work together, and, as another time traveler hunts them down, simply stay alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

At first, the memories came back in a terrible flood.

It felt like he got slammed with a new memory every five minutes. Smells triggered them, and sounds, snatches of conversation in languages from countries whose governments he’d toppled. It was overwhelming. He wrote everything down. His target in his sights, tedious waits on dark rooftops, stalking through nighttime hallways, training sessions, the chair. He wrote reams of pages every day. He filled notebook after notebook with nightmares he hoped no one would ever read. And yet, when Steve found him in Romania, a year after the helicarriers fell, Bucky remembered nothing of being Bucky Barnes. Nothing at all.

“Your recovery is incredible,” said Helen Cho, during one of the appointments the Avengers had required. “Brains are tricky things, so no promises -- but based on the rate of tissue regeneration I’m seeing in these scans, I wouldn’t be surprised if, sooner or later, you remember everything.”

In another six months, he did. He could corroborate every mission recorded in the files. He could account for every step between being taken out of cryo and being shoved back in.

And he didn't remember a single thing before Hydra.

“There’s no physiological reason for this,” Dr. Cho said to Bucky. “Your brain looks just like it was never damaged. No more traces of scarring or injury anywhere.”

Bucky picked at his hospital gown. “Guess there's no more reason to put me through any more tests.”

She shrugged. “I wouldn’t be able to pick your scans out from a lineup of healthy adults,” she said. “There’s nothing more I can do, because physically, there’s nothing wrong.” She gave Bucky a tentative smile, and asked, gently, “Have you considered the reason might be psychological?”

Bucky saw no point going back to the doctor after that.

 

 

_At first, Bucky thought he would die. The doctors thought so too; he saw it in their eyes._

_He would come to curse God for it, but Bucky survived._

_When they thought he was ready, they started on the serum treatment, so that Hydra could complete the work Zola began. After what felt like an eternity in hell, the injections stopped. Bucky was strong now, and always starving._

_They kept his single arm wrenched up behind his back, chained to an iron collar around his throat, so that his wrist and neck had bloody sores where he wouldn't stop fighting against the cuffs; they drugged him too, or he would've broken loose. It was dark, and the days bled into each other. He tested the walls of his cell and assured himself Steve was coming for him. Steve would figure out he was alive; Steve would have gone looking for his body. That was how it was at Azzano and that was how it would always be._

_It was Zola who came for him instead._

 

 

The most dangerous part of any mission was Steve.

Most of the time, the Avengers were more than enough to handle whatever situation cropped up. On the rare occasion they weren't – if a crucial player were out of commission, or a mission went to shit halfway through, or the problem called for a certain set of special skills – that's when they called in Bucky.

He wasn't fond of violence but he didn't mind it, in the same way it was easy to stop minding an injury once the anesthesia set in. Punching out assholes on command was old news; it was Steve Rogers who was the problem, particularly in the quiet moments on the way back afterward, with half the team nodding off where they sat, and Steve, across the quinjet, watching him. Wordless. Like a scientist with a disease under his microscope.

Once they landed at the New Avengers Facility, the team went inside for debriefing. Bucky didn't go in for that. He was always out of there the instant they touched down, except for one time. The arm had taken a bad hit, and if he bent his elbow too sharply it made a grinding noise like a robot being murdered. As the rest of the team straggled across the rooftop landing pad, Bucky hung back at the foot of the quinjet ramp. A biting wind swept across the roof, under the cold stars. Up ahead, the girl opened the door for the Widow, and an arc of warm light spilled out from the bright interior of the facility. The two of them hurried inside; their laughter sounded far away. Bucky had to go in there. He couldn't fix this kind of damage with the small kit he kept at home. Stark had left a lab behind. He had to go in. The wind chilled him through his uniform.

“Hey,” Steve said.

Bucky blinked. Steve hadn't gone inside with the others – he was standing back, Falcon at his side. Falcon's arms folded across his armored chest. Steve was holding his shield in both hands, loosely, the picture of a kid fiddling with the bottom of his shirt. The icy wind had chapped his cheeks ruddy. The look on his face was like a dog dumbly hoping for a treat.

“You can come in, if you want,” Steve said. He inclined his head at the bright doorway. “After debrief, Sam and I are getting drinks. You're welcome to join us if--”

Bucky did what he had to do whenever Steve acted this stupid. He set his face into a scowl and strode off the ramp, straight at the two of them, looking so murderous that Falcon leaped aside; Bucky passed between them like a ghost, brushing within an electric hairsbreadth of Steve. He blew into the facility without looking back.

He remembered where the lab was easily enough, and ended up spending a handful of hours there. He'd figured the arm out pretty well – he'd had to – but it's not like Hydra had sent him out into freedom with a manual and a repair kit. So poking around the mechanical labyrinth in there took a while, and by the time he was done it was the dead of night. Everyone should have been gone. That's the only reason he didn't bother to slip out the back door.

He bounded up the stairs to the ground level and emerged into gloom. The halls were dark. They hummed with the quiet sounds of a building at night; the crackle and buzz of sleeping electronics, the susurrating sigh of circulated air, the loud punctuation of Bucky's solitary footsteps. He went easily through the darkness, thinking about his own shower, his mattress at home. Then he stopped. Somewhere ahead was the low murmur of conversation, interspersed with an occasional echoing laugh. The next hallway ran past a huge common area, which Bucky had never spent time in. He crept forward, rounded the corner. Yes, someone was there – light shone out of the entryway and washed into the shadows at each end of the hall.

The exit was past that lounge.

Bucky heard warm laughter – Falcon's – and then the clink and pop of bottles being opened. “No, no,” Falcon was saying. “I'm _telling_ you—”

Bucky hunched his shoulders. He could slip past the open lounge entrance, like a shadow, and even if they saw him they wouldn't stop him, wouldn't address him.

Inside the lounge, someone said, with laughing protest, “Sam, come on,” and it was Steve. Bucky froze. “I was there! So you've gotta believe me that--”

“No way,” Falcon said. “I'm not falling for that. No more tall tales. And it's ridiculous – _bananas--_ ”

“They were different!” Steve insisted.

“A banana plague!” Falcon howled. “You expect me to believe that!”

“Sam, goddammit, you have your phone, just look it up.”

Hidden in the hallway, Bucky leaned against the wall. For some reason, he was smiling.

Liquid burbled as someone in the lounge took a swig. “Aw, pull the other one, old man,” Falcon said. “You remember what bananas tasted like seventy years ago?”

“It wasn't seventy years ago for me,” Steve said, flatly.

There was a second of brittle silence. Then Steve and Falcon both said, “Sorry,” and Steve said, “Don't know what's wrong with me,” and Falcon said, “I know it isn't like that for you,” both talking over each other at once. They stopped, and then both of them said “Sorry” again.

Glass thunked down on wood; the bar, or the table. “I'm cutting myself off for tonight,” Falcon announced. “No need to be more of an asshole than I've already been.”

The chair groaned as Steve shifted his weight. “No. You were right. I know it was seventy years ago.”

“Steve--”

“I know it was seventy years ago,” Steve repeated. “I – look –” The silence stretched out for a painful moment. “1925 feels like a long time ago. I was a kid back then. But those years between then and the Valkyrie, I was growing up, I was doing things. All those years after I went into the ice, they – it –”

“It doesn't feel real,” Falcon supplied.

Clothing rustled. Somehow, when he spoke, Bucky could hear the sad smile in his voice. “It's like I fell asleep on a plane and woke up in a different country,” Steve said. “Part of me thinks I should be able to get back on the plane and go home. As if the place I left is still out there.”

“Makes sense,” Falcon said. “Your average person, as the world changes, they're there to see it. They change along with it. You skipped that whole process.” Gently, he said, “You lost a lot, just like that.”

“Yeah.” A long sound of skin on glass; Bucky pictured Steve rolling it in his hands. “And the worst thing is. That Bucky--”

Bucky flinched back. He whipped around; there was a back exit and he would go there, go the long way, quickly, before he could hear any more. He didn't need to. There was a cold stone lodged in his chest and it ached and kept aching, no matter how firmly he told himself this was the way it had to be, that Steve would want it that way, if he had an ounce of sense; because Bucky Barnes was a monster.

 

 

When they’d arrived from Romania, Steve took Bucky straight to an apartment in Brooklyn. Steve had already set up a bedroom for him. The walls were hung with a series of beautiful hand-drawn portraits: two boys sitting on a fire escape, their legs dangling over the bustling street below; a kid with Bucky’s face, lighting up a cigarette, hand cupped around the flame that illuminated the wry curve of his mouth; a smiling dark-haired family arranged on the steps of a brownstone.

The pictures made Bucky’s gut jump with adrenaline. He dropped his gaze to the floor.

“I hope you like it,” Steve said behind him.

“Yeah.” What did real people say in these situations? “It's great. Thanks.”

He slept with his face in his pillow, and hurried out the door with his face down every morning.

Bucky lasted one week in that bedroom. Steve smiled a lot at first; big, slow smiles that broke over his face like the sunrise, warm and irrepressible. He liked to tell Bucky terrible stories. “Remember when--?” the stories would invariably begin. Bucky shook his head no. Well, that was okay with Steve, and as he blathered on, detailing ancient history that happened to strangers, Bucky's palms would go clammy, and his stomach would cramp with nausea. In the middle of one of these evenings of torture, Bucky got up, locked himself in the bathroom, went out the window, and was gone, and that was the end of Brooklyn.

No one knew where he lived now. Not Steve – not anyone.

It had been a couple weeks since his last mission. Bucky slept badly, and woke up all at once with his heart racing. Confused nightmare images lingered in his mind; he pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes until starbursts popped behind his eyelids. The house creaked beneath him. Its nighttime complaints were reassuringly familiar. The cold hard smoothness of his left hand felt good on his hot face. He took a deep breath, then another, and relaxed all his muscles into his mattress, letting his hands drop to his sides. He was fine.

In the darkness, a little blue square lit up with a demanding buzz. The burner phone. Going off for the second time, probably – it must have been what woke him up. Bucky fumbled for it, whacked his hand on the radio, swore, and finally snatched it off the floorboards where it lay. On the little display, the text read:

REPORT TO HQ

Bucky stared at it suspiciously.

The phone buzzed again.

BLUEJAY :-)

Correct codeword, with the stupid happy text face – that was the Widow.

Bucky flicked on his bedside lamp. It sat on the floor, next to his mattress; black shadows sprang out from his table and chair and secondhand hotplate, stretching up to the bare dark beams that crossed the ceiling. The world felt dark and quiet. Bucky's breath puffed out in thin white wisps. When he turned on the radio, it seemed as though the jazz was playing under a layer of silence. Bucky thought of the radio as almost an obscene luxury. Sometimes Hydra let him listen to music as an exceptional reward, if he'd been very good. On a normal morning nowadays, he liked to lie awake as the sun came up, listening to the radio and tapping his fingers to the rhythm.

Bucky rolled fluidly to his feet. He padded over to his solid oak wardrobe, right next to the trapdoor that was the only entrance to his attic room, so he could topple it over in an emergency. He slipped out of his warm flannel pajamas and stood shivering as he folded them and put them away. His Avengers-issue tac suit was armored and black, like the Winter Soldier getup Hydra had stuffed him in, but that was where the similarities ended; the new uniform was plain and utilitarian and looser about the chest. After buttoning a winter coat over it, he could pass as a normal guy on his way to work.

The trapdoor lowered smoothly on well-oiled hinges. Two rough wooden stubs were all that remained of the ladder Bucky had sawed off ages ago – he dropped down easily to the carpet ten feet below, silent and catlike. As he paced through the silent, tomblike kitchen, he reminded himself to do a little dusting. The attic was where he camped out, but he liked to keep the downstairs looking lived-in. If Hydra ever dropped by for a chat, they'd have to canvas the whole place, and Bucky could dive out the attic window, take off into the woods out back.

In the east, above the ragged black line of trees, the sky was lightening to a leaden gray. A few hopeful birds were chirping greetings to the dawn. Bucky stepped out his back door into the snowy yard. His new place was an old house upstate, nondescript and anonymous in its crooked row of similar little houses, battered and grayed by a long winter, beleaguered by drifts of March snow. The windows in the neighboring houses were dark; sleepy quiet lay over the street. His boots made crisp crunching noises with every step he took over to the shed where he stored his bike. As always, Bucky first checked the shed for signs of tampering, an easy enough job in the dim gray light, and then he went inside and searched the sleek black motorcycle for bugs. Only when his caution was satisfied did he walk the bike into the street.

It was a short ride to the facility. The brisk air whipping at his face was pleasant in its way, a sharp kind of refreshment after his bad night. A kilometer from his destination, Bucky dismounted and jogged the rest of the way, leaving his bike stashed in the woods behind him.

 

 

“Okay, everybody,” Steve said.

He stood at the head of the attentive group seated on the quinjet. It was a small group this time – Steve had only asked Falcon, Black Widow, and Bucky along, and everyone was dressed in subtly armored clothing that could be mistaken for business casual, nice shirts and suit pants. The Widow's bites looked like fashionable bracelets and Falcon's wingpack was indistinguishable from a normal backpack. Only Steve's shield, trying to pass as an instrument in a huge round case, looked hopelessly awkward.

Though no one except Bucky seemed surprised, there was also a civilian present, a gangling, nervous-looking man in a white lab coat.

“Here's the situation,” Steve continued. “Chronos Enterprises is a small technological research and development firm. They've put out a few patents, nothing earth-shattering. They announced a modest profit in 2015.” Steve named a respectable number. “What doesn't fit is the huge inflow of funding from private investors.”

The next number was much, much larger. Falcon whistled.

As Steve spoke, Bucky leafed through the folder in his lap. Chronos Enterprises occupied two floors in a Manhattan skyscraper. Bucky skimmed through the office layout map and building architectural plans; memorizing them was the work of seconds. One floor was reception, offices, meeting rooms. The second looked to be some kind of huge lab.

Steve said, “The money dried up after Insight, but one significant funding stream was from an account we've identified as Hydra.”

The Widow lounged back, looking like she knew all this already. Falcon asked, “Are they a Hydra front?”

“No idea,” Steve said. “Could be, or could be a case of infiltration. But we know they're working on something Hydra wanted their hands on.” He nodded at the civilian, who jittered to his feet, an anxious smile on his face. “This is Dr. David Henderson. He's the informant who brought Chronos Enterprises to our attention.”

“Hi,” Dr. Henderson said.

Steve settled back against the wall, crossing his arms. “Go ahead and explain what you told me this morning.”

He shrugged uncomfortably. “Like I said, I was brought into Chronos Enterprises to work on developing the prototype.”

Falcon sat forward. “Prototype of what?”

“The temporal displacement initiator field,” Dr. Henderson said, with a miserable sigh. He fretted at the white hem of his sleeve. “It was going to be groundbreaking. Incredible. It would open the doors to unimaginable leaps forward in, in everything, from archaeology to space flight. We were going to change the world. And we were going to be millionaires,” he added, with another saddened frown.

Out of the corner of his eye, Bucky caught Black Widow rolling her eyes. He suppressed a smile.

“I'm sorry,” Falcon said, “a _temporal displacement initiator field_ is what exactly?”

Dr. Henderson dragged a hand through his graying hair. “Well, I suppose a layperson would call it a time machine.”

Steve reacted. Minutely – this wasn't news to him – but, propped against the wall in a pose too stiff to be casual, his eyes flickered downwards, and his jaw tensed. A cold fog enveloped Bucky. He wanted badly to be off the plane. Why did Steve have to bring _him_ on this mission?

“I can see why Hydra was bankrolling this,” the Widow commented wryly.

“For years, it barely worked,” Dr. Henderson admitted. “It sends you back, alright. All our test subjects went back. We only sent them back a week. At first we thought it might be dangerous, you know, having two of these people, doppelgangers running around the office – but they all said they just woke up in their own bodies in the target period. We've never tried to send someone back to a time before their birth – maybe then they'd physically appear in the past --”

“Tell them what the problems were,” Steve interrupted.

“Huge problems!” Dr. Henderson exclaimed. “Furious investors. See, we gave the test subjects these little missions to carry out. Go back and spill your coffee on the carpet, leave a stain, paint a red stripe under your desk, that kind of thing. We'd send them off and go check on the stain or the paint and it would never be there. But the test subjects, they all swore they'd done it. It's got a limit, you know. The temporal displacement effect. No one ever stayed in the past longer than five days, and then they just – got snapped back to the moment they'd left, like a rubber band breaking, and it seemed like when that happened all the changes were erased. Time just went back to the way it was supposed to be.”

“Yeah, this shit is never as cool as it is in the movies.” Falcon's sharp gaze flicked from the scientist to Steve. “Cap, you said what the problems _were_?”

“We fixed it last week,” Dr. Henderson said.

The quinjet coasted silently through the rolling gray clouds, the faint vibrations of the engine thrumming against Bucky's back where he sat, hands gripping his knees, against the wall. He focused out the windshield, watching lacy shreds of cloud whip past, and thought furiously about what reckless _idiots_ people, and especially _scientists_ , were.

“It's about balance,” Dr. Henderson went on. “The rubber band breaking, launching you back to your point of departure – there's got to be some force pulling you back. Some kind of anchor, tying you to your own time. So we thought, if we could somehow destroy that anchor, sever that rope instead, then the test subjects would stay in the target era and any change they effected would become permanent. And we did it. It worked. The test subjects focus the temporal displacement initiator field on an object, any miscellaneous object, and it – it embodies the anchor effect, it becomes the anchor. Once in the past, all they have to do is destroy the anchor before the five-day time limit runs out and they don't boomerang back to the present. We've done this. We've been doing this all week. It works.”

The silence stretched out in the jet. Dr. Henderson glanced around at each of them, looking for – what? Awe? Bucky heaved out a weary sigh and sat back, crossing his arms emphatically, one over the other. He arranged his face to say _and now_ we _have to deal with it_. Dr. Henderson hung his head and sat back down.

“I know it's dangerous,” he muttered. “That's why I'm here.”

Steve clapped him on the shoulder as he stepped forward. “We're going in casual to see if we can get the tech before Hydra does,” he announced. “Dr. Henderson is taking us in as prospective interns. And if there's trouble, then there's trouble. Any questions?”

“Nope.” Falcon settled back in his seat and kicked his feet up. “Sounds like a plan, Cap.”

“No sir,” Bucky said.

Steve's gaze shot to his. His eyes were blue as a hot summer sky. A shock of pain like a hit from a stun baton zinged through Bucky's body. His heart hammered. He looked down.

They landed the quinjet at Stark Tower. Stark wasn't there to meet them – small mercies – but they took one of his cars to Chronos Enterprises. Bucky spent the ride staring at his mismatched hands in his lap so his gaze wouldn't be drawn out the window. He tapped a rhythm on his thigh with his metal fingers, shifted in his seat, fretted with the buttons on his coat. Something about New York made him feel like a wild animal in a cage. He knew he'd lived here, in that other life; the city lay somewhere behind the black veil that had been drawn between him and the dead man he'd been. All Bucky could remember of that other life was its brutal end. He didn't want to know more.

  
  


The elevator door dinged. They stepped into the reception area of Chronos Enterprises.

It was a boring little room. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the canyonlike streets of midtown Manhattan; the distant cacophony of traffic filtered up. A potted plant drooped between two uncomfortable-looking leather couches. A bulky blue watercooler burbled in the corner. On the wall over the reception desk hung the words CHRONOS ENTERPRISES, fashioned out of industrial steel.

It was completely empty.

Steve stepped in front of the civilian, and slipped his black instrument case into his hands.

Falcon wandered further in. “Is there a holiday I don't know about?”

“The receptionist could be in the bathroom,” the Widow said.

Dr. Henderson poked his head around Steve's broad shoulder. “We have two receptionists,” he said. “The desk is never unmanned.”

The Widow said, “Maybe today they're using the buddy system.”

The area behind the reception desk could only be accessed via a locked gate. Bucky vaulted over, landing with a hushed thump on the linoleum flooring. The desk area was a mess, strewn with scattered papers and folders and pens and other office detritus that looked as though it hadn't been organized in a year. Bucky brushed few papers aside and picked up one of the phones. The receiver blared a long dull unwavering note into his ear. His skin prickled as his body went on alert. “Phone's dead,” he said mildly.

“Well, shit,” Falcon summarized.

Steve unzipped the fake instrument case and let it fall to the floor with a thump. His shield came up at the ready on his arm. “Natasha, contact HQ,” he instructed. “Get Vision, Wanda, and War Machine down here. We might need them. Dr. Henderson, get back in the elevator, go downstairs, wait on the street. In the meantime, we're going in. Split up, in pairs, stay in touch – Bucky, you're with me. We'll clear the offices, then the labs.”

The door to the offices had an electronic lock for a keycard. They had Dr. Henderson's card, but the lock was defunct, its little indicator lights gone dead, and the door stood slightly ajar, creaking in and out of its jamb in the flow of the air conditioning. Bucky's jaw tightened. He slipped the gun in his thigh holster into his hand. Without needing orders, he slipped behind Steve. Steve took point, and Bucky guarded the rear.

They cleared office after office. It was the same story in every one: empty, computers asleep, papers and files dropped haphazardly, chairs pushed back or tipped over. In one meeting room, a projector still beamed a frozen PowerPoint presentation to an audience of vacant seats. There was no sign of violence. It looked like a fire drill had taken place, but Bucky knew, in his bones, that someone terrible was here.

“Someone came in here,” Steve murmured, and Bucky flicked him a startled glance. They were moving silently down the eerie, brightly-lit hallway. “Took control. Right away.” He pushed open another office door – craned his head around. “No one had time to even reach for a cell phone.”

“So where are they?” Bucky said. They stood in the middle of an empty corridor. The air conditioning exhaled its cold breath out of the vents, and a door creaked on its hinges in the draft. Under these small noises lay the eerie, dead silence that let Bucky know, with total certainty, that they were gone. All of them.

Steve tapped his ear. “Nat, Sam, we're all clear on this side. Found anything on yours?”

Falcon's voice came back, tense and direct. “Clear. Haven't found a soul.”

“They've got to be in the labs,” Steve said grimly, and Bucky nodded. “Natasha, rendezvous with us at the stairwell. Sam, find Dr. Henderson, keep him safe.”

“Got it,” Falcon said.

They met up with the Widow at the door to the stairwell. This door, too, was open, its electronic lock killed. The stairwell curved around a landing before terminating at the entrance to the labs. Steve went up first, his shield high, and Bucky came at his heels, his gun out and ready, like the Widow's behind him. His entire body was a live wire, ready to fire at the smallest noise; a staircase was a good killbox if any hostile upstairs suspected they were coming.

They made it up without any incident. The door to the labs was open and dead, like the rest. The labs themselves were enormous, spreading through most of the floor, with long scars in the ceiling where walls and partitions had been removed, fashioning this floor of a skyscraper in downtown New York into something resembling a warehouse. Bucky had expected it to be crammed with machinery, but instead, in the center of that vast space, there was only one station, sitting alone. For a moment of heart-lurching terror, Bucky saw the chair. Then he blinked, and the nightmare resolved into reality. The computer readouts displayed, not a human body, but the digitized image of what looked like a thick, stubby rod composed of multiple layers of thin dials. Behind the computer was a tall stand, with two curved, menacing arms arching up from it, coming back down and together to meet at a point over the center of the stand, familiar in a way that made sweat spring to Bucky's brow. The rod hung between the arms and the stand, not quite in contact with either. It revolved, suspended, in midair.

Lying prone against the walls were over fifty hostages, bound and gagged. Their eyes were wide and shining; they stared at the three intruders in silent supplication. Fifteen men in lab coats were clustered around the computer readout. They were muttering among themselves as numbers flashed onscreen.

A wordless glance passed between Steve, the Widow, and Bucky.

Steve flung his shield. It exploded into the group of scientists like a dog into pigeons, slamming two of them to the ground, scattering the rest. They pulled guns out from under their coats, smoothly, and Bucky knew, _knew_ , they were Hydra. He threw himself at them, snarling, barely aware of Steve and the Widow at his side. He broke someone's wrist, shot him in the leg with his own gun, whipped that screaming individual over his shoulder and into another man. Someone shouted “Soldier!” and Bucky crushed his windpipe in the strangling grip of his metal hand. Electricity crackled to his left, the Widow, and the shield arced past him in a red-white-blue blur.

It was over in half a minute. The shield sailed back into Steve's hand with a final thump, the last body crumpled to the ground, and they stood surrounded by a fan of unconscious, broken, and dead Hydra agents.

“Good job,” Steve said, satisfied.

“You're making me blush,” said the Widow, with a catlike smile.

Steve strode over to the bound hostages, saying as he went, “Sam, you okay?”

Falcon's response sounded in all their ears. “What do you mean, am I okay? Sounded like you had some action up there.”

Bucky rolled his shoulders. Now that the battle high was fading from his body, it left in its wake the usual empty, grim feeling that always followed violence, highlighted at the edges with a kind of wild hatred that frightened him. Trying to lock the feeling down, Bucky trailed Steve and Natasha over to the hostages.

He knelt in front of a man whose eyes were wet with terror. “It's okay,” Bucky murmured, peeling the duct tape from his face. “You're okay now.”

Dr. Henderson's voice echoed fuzzily through Falcon's mic. “Is it done?”

“Don't worry,” Falcon reassured him. “Everything's been taken care of.”

Steve was kneeling maybe six people away from Bucky, working the gag out of a woman's mouth. It popped free and she sucked in a trembling gasp. “Captain America?” she rasped.

“That's right,” Steve said gently. “You're safe now.”

“No,” the woman said. She struggled to sit up. “The prototype!”

“I would say that's safe too, but I think we might destroy it,” the Widow called, from where she was cutting through the ropes on another hostage.

Dr. Henderson's voice echoed in Bucky's ear. “Then it's time.”

“No!” the woman said again. “It's a fake! This is a trap, the prototype's a fake!”

Through the earpiece, something crunched. Falcon shouted, “Stop!” almost obscuring Dr. Henderson's choking “Hail Hydra,” and Bucky's mind put the pieces together, he'd had a cyanide capsule in his teeth, oh _fuck_ , just as one of the hostages between Bucky and Steve rose from the facedown huddle he'd been lying in. The ropes fell away from his gloved hands, and the false gag dropped from his scarred, twisted mouth. He yanked the rod, the real rod, from under his coat. Its dials were spinning, the cracks in between them blooming with a searing white light, and the glow lit up the ruined volcanic landscape of his face. It was Rumlow.

White lightning leapt from the rod to Rumlow, coruscating in crackling madness around his body.

“Hail Hydra!” Rumlow shouted, and aimed the rod at Steve.

The Widow screamed, “ _Watch_ —”

Without pausing, without thinking, on instinct, Bucky hurled himself at Steve. The rod spat lightning, and it caught Bucky up too, stinging all over, crescendoing into agony –

– and then everything went black, and he was gone. 

 

 

_The guards dragged him out of the dark, into a brightly-lit, white-walled room, and threw him into a chair. The piercing light seared his eyes so painfully tears welled up. Through the blurriness, he could make out a smear of color, a blob of peach on top of white, that gradually resolved itself into the labcoat and smug smile that Bucky would always associate with his torture at Azzano. Zola sat across from him. Bucky faced down his nightmare with tear tracks on his cheeks._

“ _Sergeant Barnes,” Zola said softly. “My greatest success.”_

_Bucky stretched his manacled feet out under the table. He lounged back in his chair, as insouciantly as he could with his one arm tied behind him, and looked Zola straight in the eye. “To hell with you,” he said. “I'm not yours.”_

“ _Perhaps not. That is, not mine alone.” Zola clasped his little hands together and leaned forward, like he was confiding an important secret. “Sergeant Barnes, you are to be the new Fist of Hydra.”_

_Whatever the hell that was. Bucky raised his eyebrows._

_Zola sat back in his chair. His smug smile deepened. “What that means, dear boy,” he said, with calm confidence, “is that you will obey our every command. You will be a great asset for Hydra. You will fight for us, kill for us, you will reshape the world for us so that Hydra may rise to the supremacy that is our destiny.”_

_The idea was so preposterous that Bucky laughed aloud, the first genuine peal of laughter he'd had in months. It echoed around the white walls. “I'll die first.”_

_Zola ignored him. He reached beneath the table and brought out a thick brown folder. “James Buchanan Barnes,” he recited. “Sergeant. 32257038.”_

“ _That's me,” Bucky agreed warily._

“ _Yes, I stand no chance of forgetting after all those weeks of your dull chanting.” Zola flipped the folder open. With a nasty little jolt, Bucky recognized his own picture in the front, glossy in the bright light. His military file. “The question remains, who is James Buchanan Barnes?” He pulled out a printed sheet of paper. “A decorated American soldier?” The paper wafted to the white floor, and Zola removed another from the folder. “The sniper of the Howling Commandos?” The second paper fell. “A New York boy?” The third. “A loving son? A loyal friend? An honorable brother-in-arms? Captain America's right-hand man?” The folder lay empty on the table._

_Bucky made himself wink. “All that and handsome, too.”_

_Zola hummed in consideration. He peered over the top of his round glasses, watching Bucky for a long, intent minute. His squinty eyes seemed as sharp as needles, boring into Bucky as deeply as if he still lay on that table in the factory. Sweat sprang up on Bucky's brow. He breathed hard and met Zola's gaze._

_Zola sat back, and Bucky's shoulders dropped._

“ _Yes,” Zola mused. “We will see.”_

_The guards removed Bucky back to the darkness._

_The real torture started shortly after that._

 

 

Something was wrong.

Bucky came to in a heartbeat and lay as still as he could, eyes closed in a semblance of sleep. Where was he? The mattress he was stretched out on was lumpy, harder than his own, so he wasn't in his attic room. What had happened? There was no beeping of machinery or antiseptic smell to indicate that he'd landed himself in a hospital; horns honked and tires squealed distantly somewhere below, but it sounded like he was still close to street level, so he couldn't be – couldn't be in the lab where –

Rumlow!

Bucky shot bolt upright and twisted up to his knees, whipping his gaze around. He was in... someone's bedroom? There was a single window hung with gauzy white curtains, through which pale sunlight fell in dusty shafts. Along the walls stood a plain writing desk cluttered with a mess of papers, books, and pencils; a dresser with a smudged mirror propped up on top; a chair with a dirty jacket flung over the back. Another curtained window beside the door looked into an adjoining room, with the shadowed outlines of furniture visible through the gauze. Bucky was kneeling on the bed, his legs tangled in the thin white sheets.

He stared around in incomprehension. If he'd been knocked out and, somehow, with both Steve and the Widow at his side, recaptured, then he'd be shackled in a base somewhere. This, however, was a normal apartment building. He just knew that somehow. The room held a familiarity that tugged at him, faintly but persistently, as though he'd glimpsed it once through someone else's window.

Somewhere in the building music was playing, sweet and slow, muffled through the walls.

Something sick and heavy started to unfurl inside him. The other possibility: he'd been hit with the device...

Behind him, someone snuffled.

Bucky looked down.

He wasn't alone in the bed. There was a lump under the quilt where another person lay, tucked between Bucky and the wall. A mop of blond hair spilled out from under the covers.

The urge to fling himself directly out the window and escape swamped Bucky so suddenly he had to clench his fingernails into his palms to keep himself grounded. The feeling of wrongness skyrocketed into nauseous dread. Silently, slowly, he untangled himself from the sheets and slipped out of the bed. The wooden floorboards threatened to creak under his bare feet. He took a deep, soundless breath, struggling to tamp down the cold fear rising in his chest. And then it hit him –

His _palms?_

Bucky raised his clammy hands. On the left palm, as human as the right, were four red crescents where his nails had bitten.

The rushing of the blood pulsing through his head drowned out the world. As if in a dream, he looked into the mirror on the dresser and saw an impossible face staring back at him: his own face, but changed, smooth-skinned, big-eyed, _young_ , topped with short sleep-rumpled curls.

He was wearing a dead boy's face.

Bucky floated in space as he stared into the mirror. It was impossible, impossible, impossible.

The sound of sheets rustling arose behind him, and a sleepy groan.

Bucky pivoted on puppet strings. The person in the bed was picking his blond head up from the pillow, propping himself up on his elbows to knuckle sleep out of his eyes, and the glimpse of his profile under his hands, the way his hair fell sweetly over his forehead, evoked such deep resonance in Bucky that it set his heart lurching in his chest. It was Steve.

Steve dragged his hand over his face, yawned, and caught sight of Bucky where he stood flattened against the dresser. He froze, and Bucky stared, couldn't stop staring even as his heart lurched in his chest. It was Steve, but bizarrely different, just like Bucky himself. His face was recognizable, but thin and delicate, like someone had grafted the same features onto a frame half the width. His big hands sprouted from slim wrists. The quilt draped over his narrow shoulders. Bucky had seen some pictures of this before he couldn't bear researching anymore, but it was something else entirely to be standing ten feet from the real thing.

Only Steve's clear blue eyes were unchanged, watching Bucky with dawning realization.

The resonance was becoming too much; the old nausea cramped him. Bucky's fingers dug into the knobs on the dresser.

“Don't run,” Steve said.

He sat up slowly and raised his hands in placation, like a man trapped alone with a wolf. Bucky pressed back against the dresser. The knobs dug into his spine.

“When are we?” Bucky rasped.

Steve scooted to the edge of the bed and set his feet on the floor, one at a time, never taking his eyes off Bucky. He was wearing baggy white boxers rucked up around his slender thighs, and he had big feet under sharp ankles. He said, “We didn't live here that long. Most of 1937.”

“1937,” Bucky repeated, and, for a weightless moment like at the top of a rollercoaster, he thought he'd be able to hang on. Then he lost his tenuous grip on panic, and bolted out the door.

The apartment was three small rooms in a straight line, bedroom kitchen living room, with the one door at the far end. Bucky hurtled through the gloom, banging into the kitchen table, vaulting over the sofa. He slammed into the door, reeled back, wrenched it open, and fell into the hallway just as a middle-aged woman emerged from the apartment across him. She gaped at him underneath her graying, perfectly coiffed hair and Bucky bolted past her, across the groaning wooden floorboards, thundering down the stairs, mind gone wild beyond any consideration of stealth. He flew across the small downstairs lobby, and threw himself out the front doors.

And stopped.

It was New York, but not as he knew it.

He stood on the top step of a stoop leading down to a crowded sidewalk. People bustled past, wrapped up in dark wool coats against the bracing air, hats and caps covering their tidy hair. Big black cars crowded the streets, belching exhaust. At the cross street, a tram rattled underneath billboards exhorting him to buy lava soap to remove silver polish from his hands _._ Another, put up by the National Association of Manufacturers, cried _It's the American Way_! Overcrowded laundry lines hung between the buildings, a chaotic spiderweb. A handful of kids in suspenders and caps kicked a clattering can around the sidewalk underneath the stoop. The smell, the way it looked, it was all so different, and yet it built and built into the compelling resonance inside Bucky until he had to clutch the railing to stay upright.

There was another difference that was just now sinking in, this time in him. He was different, alarmingly so. The city was loud, but he couldn't hear as far or discern as much as he should be able to; colors seemed weirdly muted; and he felt weak, as he had coming off the rounds of drugs Hydra liked to dose him with. This was the dead boy's body, young, small, and crucially not yet enhanced. He was small, he was weak, he was blind, he was deaf –

“What are you doing, Bucky,” came a dry voice from below him.

There was a young woman standing at the bottom of the stoop. A blue pleated skirt swished beneath her coat, matching the gray-blue of her eyes under her pinned dark curls. She stared up at him with an amused frown and crossed arms.

Bucky gaped at her, beyond speech. She knew him! She knew – not _him_ , but the dead boy. She thought – she couldn't tell –

“On your way to woo a date?” she added, and broke into a grin that she covered with a gloved hand, like she didn't know that no one had spoken to Bucky with this teasing familiarity since Steve had stopped trying.

Bucky, finally, looked down at himself, and saw that he was barefoot, clad in silly yellow pajamas.

“Uh,” he said doltishly, and stood there, stunned.

The front doors slammed open again and Steve emerged, panting, in a loose-fitting white shirt with its buttons done incorrectly, its hem spilling out of his pants. One of his suspenders hung off his hip. “Bucky,” he gasped, seizing him tightly around the wrist – Bucky's heart seized – and then did a double take at the sight of the young woman perched on the sidewalk. “ _Rebecca?_ ”

Bucky found it hard to look at the wondering, wounded expression on Steve's thin face, but neither could he bear to watch the way Rebecca's face split into a happy smile. “Steve!” she exclaimed. “You're invited too, of course!”

“Invited?” Steve said, and then immediately, “Oh, god, to—”

“Shabbat,” Rebecca agreed. “I was just dropping by on my way to work to make sure Bucky knew _for sure_ that he's _obligated_ to come on Friday.” She gave Bucky a stern look. “Otherwise Ma will cry. Anyway, what have you two been doing? Why are you—” She waved her hand as if to encompass the grand state of their being. “It's indecent,” she added, laughing. “DeeDee will love this.”

“We'll come,” Steve promised, tugging on Bucky's wrist. “But you're right, we should get inside, otherwise Mrs. Walsh will never shut up about it,” and stopped himself, that look of shocked, almost hurt joy on his face again, like he'd just been impaled but couldn't be happier about it. “Rebecca,” he repeated, and released Bucky's wrist. His skin ached like ice had been on it. Bucky could have taken that moment to flee, but stood rooted, watching Steve make his way down the stairs. The battered can came sailing between them and Rebecca, and the group of kids rushed after it, but Steve waded through them fearlessly. He folded Rebecca into a tight embrace. Her eyes widened in surprise, and in some confusion, she hugged Steve back, patting him tentatively on the shoulder.

“There there,” she said, perplexed. “I should, um, get to work. Sorry.”

“Yeah, of course,” Steve said. “Sorry.” They separated, and Steve cast wet eyes up at Bucky like he wanted Bucky, too, to come down and hug this strange girl. Bucky shook his head, firmly, once.

“See you on Friday!” she said, and hurried off toward the tram line.

Steve came slowly up the stairs. He reached out as if to capture Bucky's wrist again, and then folded his arms in to himself abruptly and buried his face in his hands. “Your sister,” he mumbled from under palms. “God, Bucky.”

Bucky eyed him. He made a series of tactical decisions. First was that, as much as he wanted to disappear into the city and then flee somewhere far away, like Antarctica, he could not do so in yellow pajamas; second was that he also couldn't leave Steve to cry in the street; and third was that, despite the overwhelming and horrifying distractions, Brock Rumlow was here, and that had to take precedence over everything.

He nudged Steve's shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Come inside.”

Steve got control of himself on the way up the four flights of stairs to their apartment. More people were milling about the hallways now, and Bucky received a handful of teasing comments from strangers who thought they knew him. Steve was breathing harshly by the time they had reached their destination; at first Bucky took it for incipient crying, and then it hit him that it was exertion, that Steve was more winded by this short climb than all the battles Bucky remembered fighting either with him or against him. He thought – no, he _knew_ somehow, that when Steve had been small, he'd had problems with his lungs. The sound of his strained breathing echoed in that terrible familiarity inside of him.

Steve had pocketed the apartment key. As he unlocked the door – Bucky, on instinct, knew not to comment about his difficulty breathing – the woman from across the hall was locking up. She sniffed loudly. Bucky glanced over. Apparently, that was the signal she'd been waiting for.

“ _Mister_ Barnes,” she said. “I know that you're a fine young man.”

Bucky grimaced. Was he?

“It's unbecoming to romp around in a state like that,” and she continued, with a pointed glare at Steve, “you should consider keeping better company.”

She sniffed again, and marched off with the pronounced clacking of her sensible heels.

The stubborn lock finally gave. “Mrs. Walsh,” Steve muttered, pushing his way inside. “Works as a filing clerk at the police station. She was always nasty.”

Bucky followed him into the apartment. Steve hit something on the wall, and the overhead lights flickered to life. Bucky could see clearly now what he'd only glimpsed in his frantic rush through the dimness. An armchair and a lamp, on a crate full of books, stood next to a bulky sofa that looked like it might be a fold-out bed. Another dresser stood against the wall, and several boxes were stacked haphazardly atop one another, the top one open and overflowing with miscellany. Beyond that, in the kitchen, the table was nothing more than a wooden slab on top of a bathtub. Underneath a tiny recessed slit that served as a window, the sink hosted a handful of dirty dishes. The rooms were separated from each other with walls that had, weirdly, big glass windows.

Bucky stood gazing around. He knew his attic room in his upstate house like the back of his right hand. He remembered the shabby one-room apartment in Romania Steve had pulled him out of. Before that, there was nothing but the cryo tank and a succession of cells in a succession of bases; he could picture himself in a dank basement, awaiting debrief, blood on his hands, shackled to the wall, but he couldn't picture himself here, in a place people knew where to find him, living with a friend, like a person.

“Bucky,” Steve said softly.

Bucky blinked. Steve had settled down on the armchair and was scratching, nervously, at a worn spot in the upholstery.

“How old are we?” he asked. Then he winced. He hadn't known he was going to ask such a pointless question until it was already too late.

Steve took a breath. He heaved his loose suspender up over his shoulder. “It's April second, 1937,” he said. “I asked on the way downstairs. I'll be nineteen soon. You just turned twenty.”

Bucky barked out a sharp, bitter laugh.

“What?” Steve demanded.

“Nothing,” Bucky said. “I don't remember ever being this young.” He turned on his heel, away from Steve's stricken expression, and marched into the bedroom. He slammed the door behind him so hard it rattled in its hinges. Then he turned to the dresser and realized his problem.

“Are these my clothes or yours in here?” he shouted through the door.

“Yours,” Steve yelled back. “Mine are in the living room, because I – uh, I sleep on the fold-out couch.”

“Then why the hell were you in my bed this morning,” Bucky muttered angrily to himself, yanking the top drawer open, even though he knew exactly why, and how infrequently that couch probably got unfolded; thinking about it gave him a feeling of impossible loneliness. The drawer held a boring selection of white or black socks, long white boxers, and white undershirts. Did he have to wear an undershirt under his shirt? Would anyone notice if he didn't? Well, it was another layer of warmth, and in a worst-case scenario could be ripped up and used as bandages. Bucky flung his pajamas to the ground and pulled on the underthings.

“We need to talk about Rumlow,” he called to Steve, hopping on one foot as he yanked on a sock.

“I don't know why he came back so far,” was Steve's immediate reply. “Why not go back to Project Insight? Change the outcome?”

Bucky bit his lip as he stepped into his itchy woolen trousers. “What could he change?” he wondered aloud. “The World Security Council set the schedule. Not much he could do to bump up the launch date. They were already trying to kill you.” His fly didn't have a zip, it had buttons. God, these were strange times. “It's not like he'd have better luck if he went back. Now, though, no serum, so maybe – and he might have more influence—”

Something thumped woodenly in the other room, like Steve had struck the kitchen table. “Sure, influence,” came Steve's voice. “Wanna bet he's been planning this, studying history? If he – Bucky, if he goes to the Red Skull, or _Hitler_ , and tells them the future, he won't just be influential. He could change the course of history. He could win the war.”

Bucky's fingers fumbled at his neck where he was finishing up the last buttons on a starchy white shirt. “He'll be on the first boat to Europe tomorrow,” he said grimly.

“He probably already is,” was Steve's dark reply. “And Bucky...” He hesitated. When he spoke again, his voice was stubbornly firm. “He'll have destroyed the anchor object by now.”

For a frightening, lurching second, the room swam around Bucky. He gripped the dresser and hung on for dear life, listening to the radio that still played in the distance, until the dizziness receded. He remembered what that meant: with the anchor object whole, they'd snap back to the present after five days. With it destroyed, they were stuck here. Forever.

He couldn't do it. He couldn't stay here, in this time, in this city, in this body, as this person. He was going to hop on the next train to nowhere and live as he'd done the first year after Hydra, anonymously, in isolation, thinking he might die and hoping it would be soon.

But then: Rumlow. Rumlow had worked with Bucky on a dozen missions. Bucky had never been a true believer; at Hydra, his one and only god was obedience; but Rumlow was a zealot, and a bully and a sadist. In 1994, Rumlow ran him on an easy hit in the Gulf, and kept him starving for days, just to see if it would make him sharper. When he'd passed out from hunger during extraction, Rumlow had taken that as insubordination. Bucky had been nothing more than a dog back then, and Rumlow had beaten him like one.

He had to take care of this first. Then he could break – but first, this.

Bucky stepped out of the bedroom. Steve was sitting on the kitchen table with his chin propped on his fist; his eyes went wide at the sight of Bucky in the old-fashioned clothing that felt like an ill-fitting costume. Bucky glanced sharply away. It must be like looking at a ghost.

“Your suspenders,” Steve said evenly.

“Thanks,” Bucky clipped out. He snapped the suspenders over his shoulders. They felt strange and constricting. “When's the next one?”

“The next what?” Steve's face scrunched up. “The next boat?”

“If Rumlow is headed to Germany, that's where we have to go.” Bucky propped himself against the wall.

Steve's response surprised him; he laughed. That cynical laughter sounded strange coming from such a young face. “Okay,” he said. He slid off the table and squatted down at the cupboards under the sink. “Let's see how much we have in savings this month.” He took out a glass jar holding a sad collection of crumpled bills and scattered coins. “That looks like about fifteen dollars. What are we going to do for the fare, rob a bank?”

Bucky shrugged. “Yeah, sure.” That had always looked easy enough.

Steve frowned. Something about that expression made Bucky's arms fold across his chest. “Sure. We'll just stroll into the bank, two scrawny kids, and stroll out with the cash. We'll do that this afternoon, then we'll go for ice cream. Why not?”

Bucky's arms tightened protectively. His hands tucked up into his armpits. “So tell me why not,” he said lowly.

Steve set the savings jar on the table with a loud clank. Earnestly, he said, “Bucky, even if we make it to Europe, what then? How will we find Rumlow before he does any damage? Once we find him, how the hell could we stop him? We're—” He gestured expansively at his small body. “Look at us!”

“So what?” Bucky demanded. He shoved off the wall. “It has to be done, doesn't it? Are you saying just give up?” It was unbelievable! “Who _are_ you?”

A foot stomped loudly on the ceiling. Their upstairs neighbor screamed, “Shut up!”

A moment of silence.

“Sorry!” Steve called.

Quiet now, but angry, Bucky planted both hands on the table, and said, “I don't remember you, you asshole, but I know you don't know when to quit. Is that who's speaking now?”

Steve swallowed sharply. He was flushed a dull red up to his hairline. Also quietly, he responded, “I didn't mean give up. I meant we can't go charging in like we would normally, or we'll be living out the century in prison.”

The penny dropped. Bucky reeled back from the table like he'd been slapped. “Jesus,” he said. “You want to live here.”

Steve's back stiffened. “Hey,” he warned.

“Fuck!” Bucky couldn't be there anymore; he strode into the living room. “This is your second chance, is that it? You're not gonna take any risks because it's more important to play house, like you still belong here?”

Steve flinched as if physically struck.

Bucky came apart. He'd been pushing through the crushing horror of being stuck here, like this, until he finally died, on the prospect of throwing his focus into an urgent mission. With Steve insistent on dawdling around, Bucky's control broke like a levee under pressure, and the panic flooded in. He couldn't be here anymore, he couldn't, he couldn't, he couldn't. “Fine,” he said, or felt himself saying; he could no longer hear his own voice through the buzzing in his head. There was a dark coat hanging by the door, big enough, had to be his. He seized it blindly. “Go ahead and play dress-up. But I can't.”

This time no one stopped him as he fled down the hallway. It was easy to disappear; he knew how. Like a wild animal melting into the jungle, Bucky let the city swallow him whole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The amazing artwork for this fic, by the lavishly talented [sgtjimbarnes](http://sgtjimbarnes.tumblr.com/)/[AngelDibs](http://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelDibs), can be found [here](http://sgtjimbarnes.tumblr.com/post/149669883981/bucky-steve-said-the-hard-edge-of-his-voice) (NB: spoilers for upcoming parts). 
> 
> Please stay tuned for the next two parts, coming very soon to an AO3 account near you.
> 
> I can be found, usually crying, on my [tumblr](http://ibroketuesday.tumblr.com/).


	2. Chapter 2

_They never asked him questions. They never made demands. They put him on the table, and they hurt him._

 

 

_Bucky promised himself Steve was coming._

_At first, he tried not to scream. Later, he couldn't if he wanted to – his voice gave out. His body learned pain. His mind learned what it was to be taken to the limit of human endurance, then past it. When his cell door opened, he'd start to shake. It was beyond his control. He shook all the way to the table._

_He grew to wish they would ask him questions. He would have told them anything. Maybe Steve would understand._

_He was drugged, always dizzy. His torturers changed constantly. The first time they froze him in the cryochamber, he thought it was an execution and he cried for relief._

 

 

_Once he was pliant, they trained him to obey. His trainer was a black-haired, square-jawed man named Lukin, who Bucky feared worse than God. If Bucky hesitated to perform a command, or slipped up, Lukin liked to yank his head around by the hair, and scream, “You will obey perfectly. You will be good.” If he refused, they took him to the table._

_If he obeyed flawlessly in a session, they gave him a blanket to sleep on._

_There were other trainings. They taught him that if he lay docile on the table for two hours, he would be rewarded; and if he moved or misbehaved, the torture would double in length. They taught him to hold positions, humiliate himself, run on command, keep his head underwater; to obey, obey, obey, flawlessly, immediately, instinctively._

_They gave him weapons. He tried to kill Lukin. He got the table. He tried to kill himself; it was the only escape route left. They hurt him so badly he never even dreamed about trying again._

_There was no way out. There was only the choice between obedience or pain. Soon enough it didn't seem like a choice at all._

 

 

_They were in the obedience room. A loaded gun lay on the table. Bucky stared expressionlessly at he wall, waiting for orders._

_“Pick up the gun,” Lukin said._

_Bucky picked it up. It dangled from his fingers, as harmless in his compliant hand as if it were a toy._

_Lukin said, “Good. Stand up. Good. Follow me.”_

_Lukin had never taken him out of the obedience room before. He didn't think too much about it. They wound through the dark, cramped hallways; he had stopped working over the layout a long time ago. He had been told to pick up the gun, stand up, and follow, and that's what he was doing. That's all he had to worry about._

_Lukin led him down a clanging iron staircase into a dark, dank room. The floor felt like concrete under Bucky's feet, and damp air currents whispered over his bare skin. For the first time in unknowable ages, Bucky actively noticed that he was naked._

_Lukin flicked the light switch. A bare bulb swinging overhead hissed and popped, and a reluctant sickly glow grew to life. The shadows scurried back, and the light picked out the wan forehead, cheekbones, nose, bare pale shoulders of a woman kneeling there nude in the middle of the room. Her hands were tied behind her back._

_Bucky stared at her. Her eyes were black pits in her skull. The pits gazed off into nothingness. She looked dead already, she looked like a corpse; except for the slight movement of her birdlike chest._

_Lukin looked at him. “Raise the gun.”_

_Bucky put it up._

_“Good. Aim at her.”_

_Bucky had been a sniper once. His hand was steady, and his aim was true, dead center on her forehead._

_“Good. Kill her.”_

_Bucky's arm wavered._

_A part of his mind wanted him to ask: why? It was idiotic. It was Hydra ordering him to kill this woman. What reason could they give that he'd accept?_

_He looked at Lukin. His mouth opened. No sound came out._

_“Kill. Her,” Lukin repeated, dangerously._

_Bucky's heart beat hummingbird fast. A cold sweat sprang up on his forehead and anxiety jangled his nerves, worse and worse every second he ignored the command. His very body screamed at him to obey._

_What was he doing? What was he_ doing _?_

_He couldn't bring himself to say the word_ no _; but he threw the gun and dropped into the fetal position on the chilly floor._

_Lukin screamed in rage. Bucky received a series of shattering kicks to his ribcage. He curled up hard and his arm flew up around his head. The moment the blows stopped, a gunshot rang out, and another, and another. Lukin dragged Bucky to his knees by his hair. Bucky howled, his eyes screwed shut. Lukin slapped him brutally across the face. “Open your eyes!” he bellowed, and Bucky's eyes flew open, and he saw the woman sprawled out backward, her head a mess of gore; Lukin hauled Bucky to the corpse and threw him to the ground, planted his boot in Bucky's back and smashed him into the sticky pool of blood and brain matter. Bucky's mind shuttered off. As if from very far away, he watched Lukin kneel down in the red pool, grip the back of Bucky's head, and grind his face into it. Distantly, Bucky thought to himself: the hell is his problem?_

_They punished him afterward, of course._

_They kept trying. There was erratic success. They brought in five people and ordered Bucky to choose one to shoot. When he refused, they shot them all in front of him, then tortured him. He cooperated the next time – picked the oldest man to kill. The time after that, however, he refused again. They ordered him to watch a victim's brutal torture, and told him her pain wouldn't end until he put her out of her misery. They had the people on the firing line confess horrible crimes. Some things worked. But nothing worked every time._

_That was how Hydra discovered the flaw in the program._

_No matter what they did to him, Bucky could not be relied upon to kill._

 

 

_Bucky sat down in the obedience room, but Lukin was not there. An old, friendly-looking man sat across from him._

“ _Hello, Bucky,” the old man said. “My name is Dr. Ivchenko.”_

 

 

Bucky rode the tram through a white fog for an immeasurable era, and eventually drifted back into the light of his own awareness on another street he didn't recognize, in a neighborhood he could no longer name. By the time, even with an unenhanced appetite, Bucky was starving. A handful of coins jingled in his pocket. He stopped at something that smelled good and called itself an automat, and found, to his cautious delight, that couple of dimes would buy coffee and a sandwich.

He stared into the dregs of his cup and thought about taking the next train to Alaska.

That night he slept behind a stack of crates in an alleyway. A bitter wind whistled around him, sending errant garbage skittering across the concrete. Bucky tucked his knees up to his chest, draped his coat over himself, and dozed fitfully as the cold night dragged on. It was a joke compared to some of the sleeping conditions Hydra provided him with – hell, even those first few months of freedom after Insight, he'd spent half his nights on the street. Still, shivering, jolting awake every time a group of drunk bargoers stumbled by, Bucky thought with devoted longing of his warm, secure mattress at home.

Dawn staggered in. As the sky bleached to a ghostly gray, the city began to stir from its own uneasy nighttime half-sleep. Curled up under his coat, Bucky listened to cars coughing to life, delivery trucks rumbling past, the clatter and calls among the men as crates were unloaded. Above him, a window rattled open, and a clothesline strung high across the alleyway dipped and swayed as someone hauled the laundry in. Bucky gave up on sleep. He rose and, shrugging on his coat, drifted to the mouth of the alley, where he plunked himself down on a stoop. He leaned his head against the chilled wrought-iron railing.

In the cold morning, with the city buzzing to life around him, blearily tired, Bucky felt a weary practicality replace the last sparks of panic. The fact was that he couldn't run. In his own time – in those years Bucky had carved out for himself after Hydra, where he could try to do something good, be someone else – he could afford to ignore his monstrous past. But he'd ended up here anyway, and monster or not, it was his job to fix it. With or without Steve.

The cold metal against his skull was an anchor; with his arms tucked around his belly, Bucky made himself look around at 1937, fighting the usual surge of nausea down. The sky had begun to blush a tender pink that sweetened the buildings' dark brick facades, the cheery billboards, the bold black curves of passing cars. The yawning grocer across the street was heaving a crate of apples onto a stand. The first commuters, old-fashioned in hats and wool, were straggling down into the subway, just like their grandchildren would eighty years later. Somewhere nearby church bells were tolling the hour, and a baby sobbed in high, thin wails, and it was a city. Just a city like any other, like Bucharest in 2015, or Moscow in 1954.

Bucky got to his feet. He jaywalked across to the grocer and bought an apple. Then he asked the way to Brooklyn Heights.

 

 

Although he'd fled in a fog of panic the day before, Bucky's sense of direction was good, and he found his way back to Oak Street without having to ask for directions more than once or twice. The morning thawed as he walked, the streets breathing out the warmth they soaked up, and Bucky ended up slinging his jacket over his shoulder. The breeze still had teeth in it, its brisk chill nipping at his face and bare throat. With a queasy medley of unease and wonder, Bucky marveled at this new, young, slim body. It felt the cold so keenly. And he kept swerving too far to avoid running into people, compensating for a bulk he no longer had.

Bucky wandered past a movie theater, a few bars, many storefronts. As he was passing a tenement building, he stopped dead. Another guy on the sidewalk nearly crashed into him, and swerved around muttering imprecations. Bucky stood stock still. He could hear nothing, see nothing out of the ordinary, not with his dampened senses, but some old, wordless instinct was tugging at him—

He backtracked a few feet to the mouth of the alley he'd just passed. There was a kid standing there, a burly teenager, scowling with violent passion at a pair of aluminum garbage cans.

“I told you not to come around here!” he yelled at the garbage.

Bucky was already sprinting into the alley when Steve Rogers staggered upright from behind the cans, scuffed and dirty, eyes shining with defiance over his bloodied nose. He said, “I don't take orders from you.”

The kid was raising his arm to take another punch when the Winter Soldier stormed in.

Hydra had left Bucky with the body of a world-class assassin: powerful, precise, enhanced, equipped with the muscle memory of comprehensive combat training, forged into the perfect weapon. In 1937, however, he was raw material. Bucky struck out with what he meant to be a fast, solid punch that would lay the kid out flat. Instead, he watched in slow-motion horror as his fist, attached to a weaker-than-anticipated arm, sailed breezily past the kid's noise. The momentum of his swing pulled Bucky's lighter body into an off-balance pivot, which he turned into an awkward pirouette, and he landed clumsily with his fists up, facing the kid, astonished. It was like trying to throw a poorly-weighted knife. Standing next to the garbage, Steve's mouth opened in surprise.

The kid guffawed.

Bucky _was_ a world-class assassin, and a part-time Avenger, and he was, when in his own body, biologically somewhere in his thirties. So he reminded himself he was above hating this back-alley bully, crossed his arms, and composed his face into a stern expression, as though he still had any dignity. “Get lost,” he tried.

This was met with a snort of derision. “I'm not done teaching your little pal a lesson.”

“Give it a rest, Billy,” Steve said, sounding weary. He limped around the garbage cans to Bucky's side. “It's two on one now. Do the math.”

Billy hesitated, gaze flicking between them, and finally sighed. “You're not worth it, Rogers. Stay on your own block.”

They both watched him leave; Steve was frowning, the last of his defiant anger draining into an odd, contemplative sadness. “He's so young,” he said.

Bucky didn't care. He was studying his smooth, helpless little baby hands with dismay, replaying the terrible moment his punch breezed half a foot off its mark. “I'm useless,” he remarked sadly.

Steve wiped his bloody nose on the back of his hand. “ _You're_ useless?” He nodded down at himself, all five-foot-nothing of his rickety frame, shirt dirtied and untucked after his tumble into the garbage, and just as Bucky was thinking that it was different for Steve, who had something bigger than this body inside of him, Steve glanced up with a teasing sparkle in his eye. Their gazes met, and an unspoken, wry understanding passed between them: two supersoldiers, caught up in block politics, unable to fight off a teenage idiot.

Steve shook his head and looked down to straighten up his shirt. “You hungry?” he asked, snapping a suspender back into place.

They wound up in a cheap, greasy-smelling diner, where the air was rich with the rattling of cutlery, the sizzle and pop of oil on the stove, and the murmur of conversation. By unspoken agreement, Bucky and Steve headed for a booth at the back, away from the windows and from the other people in the joint, who had all gravitated toward the sunlight seats, like cats. A sympathetic-looking waitress who greeted Bucky by name – would it always give him that sick jolt in his stomach? – supplied Steve with wet napkins for his bloody face and hand. She shot Bucky a sweet, flirtatious smile as she handed them over. He buried his face in his menu, waiting in consternation for her to go away.

“Rosie's gonna think you hit your head.” Steve scrubbed at the blood crusted on his lip, smearing red everywhere. “Order the hotcakes. They're your favorite.”

Bucky scowled – he'd already been planning on the hotcakes, damn Steve – although he did wind up ordering them, and when they came they were sweet and fluffy, slathered with butter. Bucky attacked them with much more success than he'd had in that alleyway.

Steve picked at his own eggs, watching Bucky with a shuttered expression. Although Rumlow was the only one who had ever truly starved him, Hydra largely fed Bucky nutrient slop through a tube, keeping him nourished but hungry, like an attack dog; real food had usually come in scraps, as a reward after missions or a favor from someone on his team, and Bucky had known, on the level of instinct that survived the mindwipes, that anything he didn't cram into his face could be snatched away. A few waiters since Insight had asked if he'd been in prison, and Bucky once again became abruptly conscious of the animal voracity he was tearing into his meal with. He was hunched over his plate, his arms boxing it in like a bulwark; he forced himself to straighten up and take his elbows off the table. He cut a very precise bite from his ravaged hotcakes and met Steve's eyes as he popped it into his mouth.

Steve smiled awkwardly. “Sorry,” he said. Then he sighed, fiddling with his eggy fork. “I owe you an apology. For yesterday.”

There was a ragged crack running through the red vinyl upholstery near Bucky's leg. He picked at it, trying to tamp down on the tangle of emotions that such a simple statement had provoked. He shrugged. “You don't have to—”

“No.” Steve lifted his chin, and said, bravely, “I was a coward. You were right. I was thinking about myself, not what has to be done about Rumlow. Wanting to – to have another chance, that's beside the point.” He set his shoulders in a determined line, and looked, for all the world, every inch Captain America. “We'll get the money. Maybe not by robbing a bank, but we can both get advances at work, or take out a loan. We'll get to Europe somehow, and we'll make this right.”

Even though this was what Bucky had expected and needed to hear the day before, he felt a nasty twinge of guilt roil through him. If he were a good person, he'd volunteer to take on Rumlow by himself so that Steve could go home, where he deserved to be. He stole a look at Steve's resolute expression; no, it was too late now; suggesting anything along those lines would make Steve dig his heels in.

“Yeah,” he said. “We'll make it right.”

They paid up and left. They walked in silence; Steve led Bucky on a confident route through the crowded, noisy streets of Brooklyn, as sure-footed as though seventy years of war and ice didn't separate him from this life. The sun glowed down on the brownstones, accenting the brickwork in shades of gold. Steve's hair shone like ripened wheat in summer, and his face held a look of bright excitement that Bucky had never seen on him before. He'd always felt that Steve was reserved, but here he was waving to people across the street, greeting passersby by name, eliciting looks of pleased surprise.

Bucky kept glancing down at Steve's golden head, drawn to him like a tongue to a toothache. It was bizarre to see him like this, striding at Bucky's side with the confidence of Captain America and a body half the size. And even more jarring was the feeling of rightness underlying the wrongness – the same pressing sense of frustrated recognition he'd felt in DC when he stared down a stranger and _knew_ him. It was instinct. He knew just the angle to turn his head to look at Steve; his legs knew how to match his stride; his arms held the sense-memory of reaching out at just the right height to haul Steve in close. His body knew this.

Steve was turning into another alleyway, a shortcut home; Bucky stopped for a moment, hands in his pockets, watching him step into the shadows. He called out, “I'm sorry too.”

Steve turned to face him. “What for?”

Bucky came into the alleyway, head tipped back to look at the web of wires and clotheslines crisscrossing the slice of blue sky between the rooftops. He said to the sky, “I shouldn't have taken off like that.”

Steve looked at him with a wondering expression that made Bucky feel guilty as hell – and, at the same time, he bristled like a porcupine on the defense; did Steve think it had been easy and fun to keep him at bay? Did he never wonder why Bucky had allowed himself to be collected into the Avengers, his shameful weakness that kept him trailing after Steve like a hungry stray, even as he told himself over and over it would be best to disappear?

His hands twisted in his pockets. The quiet alley they were in stretched through a long narrow span of darkness before it opened on to the bustling sunlit street. Steve stood framed against that bright picture, in the shadows with Bucky, and Bucky had no call to go making this harder on either of them, he was a damn fool for opening his mouth in the first place, but he said, “This is a godawful state of affairs.”

It would have been easy for Steve to mistake that as being about Rumlow, and for a lurching second of anxious hope, Bucky thought he would. But Steve's face gentled into an expression that was tender as a bruise. “Being here?”

Bucky jerked his head yes. He had brought his hands out of his pockets without noticing, and now he was fretting at the bony knob of his left wrist. “I don't remember jack shit.”

“Yeah, I've gotten foggy on the details too,” Steve said, and Bucky was so surprised he actually laughed, rocking back on his heels. Steve cracked a quick, crooked smile; but the bruised look lingered in his eyes. Then he said, “Why is that?”

Bucky raised his eyebrows.

Steve's shoulders hunched up in an awkward shrug. “You remember... when Hydra had you.”

“Everything,” Bucky said quietly.

“But not – this.” Steve looked around, taking in the grimy alley, the lines of laundry, the tenements, the people in their old-fashioned clothes and cars; all of Brooklyn in 1937. “It's been eating at me. The time they always had you in that damn chair, you remember just fine. Why isn't it the other way around?” He spread his hands helplessly. “Shouldn't _this_ be what you remember?”

All Bucky could do was stare at him. His mouth opened uselessly. What could he say? The skin had healed over that bullet; he'd have to carve himself open to dig it out, and he couldn't bring himself to confess that the person he'd been deserved to be forgotten.

Something made a scraping sound behind them. Footsteps approached. Someone was coming through the alley, so Bucky shuffled backward on reflex, to make room. Then the footsteps picked up speed, and Bucky turned, already scowling, ready to tell whatever wearisome bully _this_ was to beat it.

It was Rumlow who was charging down the alley.

Bucky threw himself in front of Steve.

Rumlow slammed into him with the force of an oncoming train. Bucky went crashing to the ground, chest feeling gored with the wind knocked out of it, all of Rumlow's weight pinning him to the dirty cement. Rumlow's melted nightmare face leered down at him. His hand came up with a knife in it, flashing silver in the murky air, and Bucky wrenched his arm free and caught Rumlow's wrist, bracing his elbow against Rumlow's strength, trying to keep the knife from plunging through his eye. Rumlow broke through his resistance easy as snapping a finger. The blade screeched on the ground inches from Bucky's face. He struggled wildly, trying to buck Rumlow off him; he was immovable, he was impossibly strong, he was a full-grown soldier and Bucky was in the worthless body of a lanky kid.

So then, he was about to die.

“Steve, run!” he screamed, got his other arm out from underneath Rumlow, and grabbed for the knife with both hands. They wrestled for it, and then with an angry grunt Rumlow's knee came up and he smashed Bucky's side in. Bucky's breath punched out of him; his desperate grip loosened. Rumlow snatched the knife away.

Steve came out of nowhere and kicked Rumlow in the head.

With a groan, Rumlow rolled off Bucky, just barely, just enough for Bucky to scramble out from under him and leap to his feet. Steve was looming over Rumlow with a thunderstorm on his face, looking like he had every intention of kicking Rumlow's brains out with his newspaper-stuffed shoes. Bucky seized his arm and dragged him away.

“I told you to run!” he barked.

“And leave you?” Steve snapped.

A low chuckle sounded. They both stopped dead and looked to Rumlow, who had already levered himself up on one knee. He was grinning at them; his scarred mouth was full of white teeth. He stared right at Steve. “Hey, Cap,” he said. “Aren't you two adorable.”

He launched himself at them.

They fled.

They had almost made it to the mouth of the alley when Rumlow grabbed the back of Steve's jacket and yanked hard. Bucky pivoted, clutched at Steve's shirtfront, and he slipped out of that cheap, ill-fitting jacket with barely a rustle of fabric. Before Rumlow could recover, Bucky and Steve hurtled on to the open, sunlit sidewalk. Bucky fell into a woman with an elegant black cap pinned to her neat coiffure, knocking her shopping bags out of her gloved hands.

“Excuse me!” she shrieked.

There was no time to apologize. Steve's hands were on his shoulders, hauling him up, and they flew into the street, dodging traffic, and into a narrow road that opened onto an empty lot.

“Follow me!” Steve said, and took off with Bucky at his heels, leading him on a complicated route through Brooklyn. Bucky kept checking behind them, but Rumlow never materialized; after a while Bucky let himself believe that he was unwilling to hunt them in the middle of the day, but he didn't stop checking.

Finally, Steve yanked open the door to a florist's and they tramped through – the florist casting them an alarmed glare from behind the counter – and out the back, then through a door that was standing open across the cramped alley.

Inside, Bucky found himself in a rickety hallway that Steve made a beeline through. At the end of the hallway was a wood-paneled bar, lit only by the dusty sunlight streaming in through the windows, falling in puddles on the floorboards and empty tables and the one midday drunk who was snoozing in a booth. A man stood on a three-legged stool behind the bar, rearranging the shelves of glinting glass bottles.

“Hey, Don,” Steve gasped.

Don looked around quizzically and frowned when he spotted them. He was skinny and blond, like Steve – though not as good-looking, Bucky thought – and his frown deepened as his gaze raked over them: Steve wheezing in irregular breaths, missing his jacket, Bucky with his hair in chaos, grimy from his night on the streets, both of them looking hunted.

“Hey, Steve,” Don said warily.

Steve tried to smile. It looked painful. “Can we use the back room?”

Don sighed. “Are you planning to start another fight in there?”

After extracting a promise that both Bucky and Steve had come with peaceable intentions, Don led them down the hallway to a small room hardly larger than a closet, which barely managed to contain a single table and cohort of chairs that were crammed in around it. The walls were plastered with posters for the organizations like League for Industrial Democracy and the Young People's Socialist League and other leagues Bucky was sure had meant something to him once. “Please don't start punching anyone,” Don said, and left them alone.

As soon as he was gone, Steve sagged against the wall. His breathing changed as he stopped trying to hold it together; he collapsed into a chair, clutched his knees, and wheezed out shallow, irregular breaths. Bucky quashed the fear that was trying to rise at the sound of that breathing; it was useless. He went out and begged two glasses of water off Don, brought them back and made Steve drink. Some old instinct was telling him to rub Steve's back as he wheezed his way back to a normal rhythm. He could still feel the rough warmth of Steve's clothes on his fingertips from when he'd grabbed him away from Rumlow. He sat there with his hands fisted in his lap.

Steve managed a deep breath. “Bucky,” he said on the exhale. “Why is... he _here_?”

Bucky shook his head. He tapped out a fretful rhythm on the tabletop.

“He's supposed to be... on a boat,” Steve complained in between wheezes. Now he was sitting straight upright in his chair, focused and outraged.

“He was always going to come for us,” Bucky said, keeping his voice flat. Steve, Rumlow might have wanted to kill. But Bucky was a different matter, and if Rumlow dropped his name in Zola's ear – what might come for Bucky would be worse than death.

“But now?” Steve insisted. He was gazing at the wall somewhere over Bucky's shoulder, focused inward, just like on a mission, trying to suss out the detail that felt wrong. “In broad daylight? He could send... all of Hydra after us... in a week or two, and he comes alone... in the middle of Brooklyn Heights? It doesn't make sense!”

Bucky bit his lip. Steve was right. Rumlow was an asshole, a petty sadist, and a Nazi, but he was a good operative. Not just an operative, he was a commander, a tactician, and this little adventure had clearly been well-organized: the setup, the lure, the ambush; it truly didn't make sense that he'd plan that far and then go off the rails as soon as he landed in 1937. It didn't fit with the way he'd gotten them to the lab and then fired that device at –

– at Steve.

It all came together at once. The world rocked around him.

“It does make sense,” Bucky said. His voice sounded very far away.

Steve sat forward in concern. “Bucky?”

Bucky was gripping the edge of the table. “He came after _you_ in that alley. It must've been the first opening he had, he attacked first thing, like he's running out of time, he attacked _you—_ ”

Steve's eyes went wide.

Relentlessly, Bucky continued, “In the lab, he fired that thing at _you—_ ”

“We don't even know if it's possible,” Steve said.

“What other explanation is there?”

Steve's eyebrows shot up and he sat back in his chair, wearing the small, sardonic smile of a man who's had too many bombs dropped on him to care anymore. “Well, shit,” he said with feeling. “I'm the anchor.”

 

 

“Goddammit, Steve!” Bucky shouted.

It was evening, they were still at the bar, and they'd been arguing in circles for ages. Steve was leaning with fake nonchalance against the wall, arms crossed, shoulders high like an offended cat. Bucky paced at the other end of the table.

“Bucky, we can't just run,” Steve said, in a voice as stiff as the set of his shoulders.

“Yeah, we can, and we're gonna!” Bucky spread his hands out in supplication to the obvious. “You're the anchor. Rumlow's only got three more days to kill you, and he's gonna try his damnedest. We need to get you out of here! We can hole up somewhere until time resets—”

Now that there was a real chance Bucky could get home, get himself out of this nightmare he'd thought inescapable, he was vibrating out of his skin with the need to get it over with. He kept scraping the nails of his right hand against his unnervingly human left palm, trying to rein himself in.

Steve was shaking his head in stubborn negation. “What if we're wrong? What if—”

The door cracked ajar. A sweet-looking young man popped his head in. “Is this the—”

“No!” Steve and Bucky yelled in unison.

The man's eyes widened in alarm and he yanked his head out.

Steve strode over and slammed the door shut. “What if it's not me?” he continued.

“It is you!” Bucky shouted.

“But what if it's not?” Steve shouted back. He took a deep breath, dragging his hands down his face. With forced calm, he said, “It makes sense, but we don't know for sure. If there's the slightest chance Rumlow's already destroyed the anchor, and this is permanent, then—”

“No,” Bucky groaned.

“Then we can't just call it a day,” Steve persisted. “It's our job to fix this, same as before. And now we don't have to go hunting through Nazi Germany for him. He's _here_ , we know what he wants, and he'll be coming for it.”

Bucky sighed, slumping against the wall. He ran a hand through his hair. The worst thing was that Steve was right. Being a self-sacrificing idiot, as usual, recklessly flinging himself into danger, again not unheard of – but he was right.

“Damn you,” Bucky said, heartfelt.

Steve shrugged.

“Okay.” Bucky pushed himself off the wall. “So let's kill him.”

They wended their way through the bar, now chaotic and crowded, filled with a din of laughter and chatter and the clinking of glasses that drowned out the lively music. On the way out, Bucky spotted the sweet-faced fellow in a group of other men and waved to him, mouthing _Room's free_. The guy gave him a nervous smile. On second glance, not all the people in his crowd were men; some of the minglers dressed up in jackets and trousers were women, and lots of the people wearing lipstick and dresses weren't.

“What kind of bar is this?” Bucky asked as they stepped outside.

The air was dark and damp; a chilly, misting rain pricked Bucky's skin. Steve gave him a long, considering look. “Queer bar,” he said.

They walked through the drizzle. Bucky kept quiet. It was something he'd suspected about himself, but he'd never – it just hadn't seemed to matter before now; who'd want him?

“Did I go there often?” he asked, eventually.

That bruised expression flickered over Steve's face. “Often enough. Not just that one, either.” He gave a lopsided shrug. Bleary rays of golden light, diffuse in the mist, poured onto the sidewalk from the rain-streaked windows they passed. The glow lit up Steve's face, illuminating, to Bucky's surprise, a secret, fond smile. “You were always going out. Bars, dance halls, anything that caught your fancy – and if you couldn't drag me along with you, you'd make a dozen friends there.” He shook his head in affectionate exasperation. “How many times did you run home just to do up your hair and dash out again?”

A door ahead of them flung open and a group of girls spilled out into the night, laughing, a couple of them tugging grinning young men along by the hand. They streamed past Bucky like water around an island. Deep sadness rose from some buried well inside him. He couldn't picture it; feeling safe in a crowd of strangers, coping with the press of their bodies around his, wanting to look nice and be seen as though he could hide the fact that he was damaged goods.

“I don't do that anymore,” he said.

The smile on Steve's face twisted sideways into something calm and sad. “I know.”

They took a room at a boardinghouse for the night; it wasn't safe to go home. Rumlow had had plenty of time to do his research, and from what Steve had to say, he'd used it well. He'd found their 1937 address. He'd figured out a shortcut they'd likely pass through, something fittingly dark and secluded, and he'd staked it out. He probably knew where they worked, where Bucky's family lived and what their names were – which was more than Bucky himself knew – and all the other public record information that was widely available for any interested student of history.

“I don't know what history professor he tortured for this,” Steve commented cynically.

The trick to killing him was that it was impossible. Bucky had run maybe a dozen missions with Rumlow in the twenty years leading up to the last one, and he knew firsthand what a brutal, efficient killer he was. He'd been afraid of Rumlow then, as he'd feared all the men who told him if he could sleep, if he could eat, who he should kill, if he'd be punished or rewarded for the atrocities he'd committed. He'd been helpless to disobey – but if resistance had crossed his mind, it would have taken him five seconds to reduce Rumlow to red puree. Now disobedience was a way of life for him, but in the alleyway, when Rumlow was lunging at him like a tiger and Bucky had gone down like easy prey, the old feeling of powerlessness had rushed back in full force.

And Steve was about ninety pounds soaking wet. So they had to be smart about this one.

They sat on their hard beds in their austere little room, facing each other across the bedside table they were using as a desk, and they went to work.

“It'll have to be in the apartment,” Steve said, tapping the pencil he'd pilfered on the nightstand. “It's the only place we can lure him that's private enough. It would have to be silent, but if we can get him in, and then incapacitate him...”

They knew Rumlow had been surveilling their area, and in all likelihood he still was, so if all went to plan luring him would be simple: stage a falling-out and get him to think Steve would be alone in the apartment, vulnerable, like a bird faking a broken wing. Bucky tried to convince Steve to slip out the back and absent himself entirely from the danger, but Steve firmed his jaw up and stated, “I'm the bait. The bait's gotta be in the trap,” and that was that.

Once they had Rumlow down, they would kill him, silently and cleanly, and dispose of the pieces over the next few days. This point inspired another round of hushed, furious contention.

“I'll be doing all the wetwork,” Bucky whispered angrily. “You can't go to jail for murder! If we're stuck here after all, then history needs you!”

“You can't go to jail either,” Steve protested. “Your ma is expecting you for Shabbat in two days.”

Bucky grimaced. He'd dismissed that out of hand and had been actively avoiding thinking about having seen Rebecca. “Like hell we're really going to that.”

“We are.”

“No, we're not.”

“Yes, Bucky, we are.”

Bucky got Steve to agree to stay on the sidelines for the actual killing, and that was the only victory he won.

The night wore on. Bucky's own, enhanced body could go for days without rest when it was called for; he had stalked a target through the Siberian taiga once, walking ceaselessly night and day; Hydra had had to keep him awake for a week and a half before he cracked from the sleep dep. Now he was a normal human kid who had recently slept on the streets, been chased through Brooklyn, and planned a murder. He found himself yawning uncontrollably.

Steve had bruised circles under his eyes, but his pencil was scratching steadily away at his notes. “You should lie down for a while,” he said mildly.

“I don't take orders from you,” Bucky parroted. Steve laughed. Bucky eased himself down, curling up on top of the scratchy, worn-out blanket. The pillow was floppy and thin, but he tucked it between his head and his arm anyway. “I'm awake,” he said, and closed his eyes.

Time blurred. Bucky glanced up from the pillow and Steve was gazing out the black square of window, toying with his pen; he looked up again a minute later and Steve was hunched over the nightstand, reading over his notes. Bucky watched him sleepily. His smudged shirtsleeves were rolled up to his bony elbows, his suspenders gone from his shoulders, his big hands clasped under his delicate chin. The lamp he read by highlighted all the fine golden hair that dusted his slim forearms and threw shadows on his contemplative face, darkening his eyes to a night-sky blue. He looked eighteen and innocent; his eyes were a hundred years old.

Steve glanced up and met Bucky's lidded gaze. His mouth quirked at the corner. They watched each other for a moment, serene and quiet in their bubble of gentle lamplight.

“It's okay, Buck,” he said softly. “I've got this.”

Bucky nodded. That seemed alright. He let himself slip away.

 

 

_Bucky woke up in his cell. Footsteps pounded past the door. His wrist was twisted into the neck cuff, and that meant his body pressed uncomfortably into the cold, grimy concrete. As discomforts went, it was barely worth thinking about. He closed his eyes. In the darkness, his body felt like a ship floating on a gentle sea._

_Another couple of soldiers hurried past, shouting to each other. Bucky's eyes flickered open. They kept trying to slip back closed, but he forced himself awake. Something was wrong._

_A sudden roar of shouts went up somewhere in the base. Gunfire spat in a rapid tattoo. In the hallway, the red alarm light began flashing._

_Adrenaline surged through Bucky. He fought into a sitting position. Was the base under attack? Maybe Russia was being invaded, or Hydra was being ousted, and the soldiers would do him the favor of killing him when they came through the cells. No, it was too much to hope for._

_An entire squad of soldiers went racing through the hallway. They had barely been gone a minute when the shouting started again, gunfire, a clanging noise. The sounds were growing louder. Bucky's heartbeat ratcheted up. They_ were _coming into the cells. And what if it was... rescue? What would Allied soldiers think, seeing him there sitting in the darkness, nude, bruised, gaunt as a starveling, his one arm shackled to the back of his neck? Would they be able to tell what he'd done?_

_Bucky sat there, swaying with dizziness, his heart rabbiting, listening to the sounds of the skirmish draw closer and closer to his cell. They were almost upon him when everything stopped. One last body thudded to the ground. A moment of silence. Bucky's hand flexed convulsively at the nape of his neck. Then the footsteps of a lone man came down the hallway, treading cautiously like he didn't know exactly where to go._

_Bucky found himself mouthing_ please, please, please _..._

_The footsteps stopped in front of his door. There was the fumbling scrape of a key in the lock. The door swung open._

_A man stood framed in silhouette against the red flaring of the alarm, broad-shouldered, tall, and, impossibly, miraculously, slung over his arm was the unmistakable curve of a vibranium shield._

_Bucky's mouth fell open. His throat clicked._

_The man took a step into the cell. Closer, Bucky could see the red, white, and blue on that shield, on that uniform –_

“ _Steve?” he croaked._

“ _Bucky?” the man cried. He ripped his helmet off, and in the split second before he was engulfed Bucky saw that tousled blond hair, those shockingly blue eyes, like an arrow to his heart, it was Steve, it was_ Steve, it was Steve _– and then with one stride Steve was across the room and down on his knees and he swept Bucky up into a crushing embrace, and Bucky wasn't thinking about his shame anymore, he just buried his face in Steve's neck and pressed into him like he could fuse their bodies together._

“ _Steve,” he was mumbling, reeling like he'd been punched. “Steve, Steve.”_

“ _I didn't think I'd really find you,” Steve said. His breath was warm on Bucky's face. “God, Bucky.”_

_No response would come past the wet knot in his throat. Bucky swayed backward and the distance hurt and he leaned into Steve again and kissed him._

_Steve's lips twitched under Bucky's. It was only a moment before he pulled back, his mouth still closed. In the dimness, his expression was impossible to read._

“ _Time to get you out of here,” he said._

_Steve set Bucky back on his knees and pushed to his feet. As Bucky tried to get his feet under him, Steve reached down, steadied him, and eased him up, one gentle hand on Bucky's sore, twisted elbow, the other on his naked shoulder. Steve's hands were bare. The kind touch almost undid him._

_There was a problem at the door of the cell. As Steve stepped through, Bucky stopped as abruptly as if he'd crashed into a wall. Terror doused him in an icy cascade; he started to shake. Escape was not permitted. He was disobeying._

“ _Come on,” Steve said. He reached back through the threshold and pulled Bucky out of the darkness._

_The red lights pulsed, casting the slumped corpses on the floor into eerie relief as Steve guided Bucky's stumbling path down the hallway, his arm curled around his shoulders. Bucky's head pounded in time with the flashing and the rough fabric of Steve's uniform chafed his skin. Steve steered him through a shadowed doorway and up a narrow, groaning stairwell. Bucky kept tripping as he stole glance after glance up at Steve's stubborn jaw, his soft mouth. God, this was impossible. It couldn't be. Bucky had given up hope._

_But it was happening. He was going home._

_They rounded a corner and something was wrong._

_Steve pressed forward, dragging Bucky along with him._

“ _Steve,” Bucky rasped. “Wait.”_

_Steve glanced down at him. “What's wrong?”_

_The alarm blinked in and out, in and out. It was quiet, deadly quiet, but somewhere close by Bucky had a sense of shifting movement – breathing –_

_They were walking, Bucky staggering with Steve; he said “Wait,” again; Steve was pulling him through a corridor with rows of doorways on both sides, open, empty, black as the night._

_The attack came from everywhere, all at once._

_A soldier in a Hydra uniform leaped on Bucky. He went down hard, smashing into the stump of his arm, crying out as pain tore through him. Steve spun around in surprise but a gang of soldiers pouring in from everywhere threw themselves on him, a gunshot went off, Steve struggled but they got his shield and there were so many – Bucky screamed and tried to lurch off the ground – he saw the butt of a rifle come down hard on Steve's head, and Steve collapsed, limp, unconscious,_ they had him _– and something heavy cracked into Bucky's skull, and he was gone._

 

 

The next day they only had one real errand before it was time to spring the trap. Bucky would have preferred to while away the hours in an automat in the company of multiple cups of coffee, but Steve made it clear that he was going on a tour of historical Brooklyn, and in the interests of Steve's own safety, Bucky was forced to accompany him. They bought funny-tasting bananas at a grocer's for breakfast – “I wish I could bring these back for Sam,” Steve mourned – and descended into the crowded subway for a cramped, rattling ride to Parsons, where Steve took art classes.

At the school they ran into a girl named Maria Carmen, who asked after Steve's health and wondered why he'd missed class yesterday.

“I've been on the run all week,” Steve apologized. Bucky sighed.

The important stop was at a hospital. Steve led Bucky up to the infectious disease ward, where two nurses were manning the nurses' station. The younger one, a plump girl with cherry cheeks, brightened up when she spotted Steve. “Steve!” she cried, to which Steve replied, “Margie, hi!” and they hugged awkwardly over the counter; the older one, wearing a permanent thin-lipped frown underneath her white cap, went on working on her paperwork as if nothing was happening.

There was a locked closet next to the nurses' station. Steve had told Bucky where it would be. Bucky hung back from the station; the corridor was empty and both nurses were absorbed. He sidled over the door, took out the paperclips he'd filched from the boardinghouse, and had the door open in seconds. He slipped inside. Medicines of all kind lined the shelves in jars and bottles and tins. Bucky saw what he was looking for right away, a cluster of clear stoppered bottles near the back: chloroform. He grabbed a bottle, and then a small vial of penicillin, and a couple of alarming-looking metal syringes.

Bucky pocketed his loot and hurried out the door. He closed it soundlessly behind him. The theft had taken less than ten seconds.

“I hope you've been doing alright, Steve,” Margie was saying as Bucky skulked over to the counter. “It's just not the same here without Sarah.”

“We all miss her,” the older woman said sourly to her paperwork.

Steve smiled sadly. “I miss her too.”

Margie patted Steve's hand. “Is there anything you need?”

“No, I'm doing okay,” Steve said. “Really. I... have important work. And good friends.” He caught sight of Bucky, and Bucky gave a short nod: it's done.

Margie let them go once Steve promised to drop by again soon. After that, they zigzagged around Brooklyn. At first Bucky tried not to think about it, but the queasiness and constant underlying frisson of anxiety were becoming easy to ignore, and eventually his curiosity won out. Everywhere they went – Prospect Park, a particular cafe in Red Hook, a little art gallery on Fulton where the frames rattled on the walls whenever the El passed over – they weren't just places that had meant something to Steve. There was always a person there he was coming to see – and most of those people knew Bucky, too. The strange thing was they almost never stayed for very long. Steve would don that look of aching happiness, they'd all exchange a round of hellos and do a bit of boring small talk, Steve and Bucky would look around, and that would be it. It was an oddity.

As they stood in the subway rattling back to Brooklyn Heights, Bucky asked, “Are all these people your friends?”

Steve shrugged a no. “I didn't have a lot of close friends, except...” His eyes flicked to Bucky. “I wish Rumlow had taken us to '43 or '44. I would have loved to see... some people.” He bit his lip, and his eyes went distant; then he shook his head, shaking off the mood. “Some of them are friends. Others are just people I know. Knew.”

The train swayed around a curve; Bucky gripped the pole and swayed with it. “So what's with the reunion tour?”

“I never thought I'd see any of them again,” Steve said simply. “You don't realize how many people you know until they're all gone.”

Bucky looked down, swaying with the train, his thoughts rolling. For the first time it occurred to him that he'd lost those people too; they'd been pulled up by the roots – you had to remember someone to miss them.

“Hey, Steve,” he said. “If they'd seen you planning a hit last night, what do you think those people would say?”

Steve laughed. “Oh, probably, 'That Steve Rogers, I always knew he'd come to no good.'”

If that was true then the people of Brooklyn were idiots.

They came out of the subway into the ruddy evening sunlight. It was time to set the trap.

The first step was to stage a fight. They walked to a corner Steve had selected, not so close to the alley where they'd met Rumlow that it was obvious, but close enough there was a good chance he'd be somewhere around, and started gesticulating angrily at each other. This was one of the parts Bucky hadn't liked in the planning stages and didn't like any better now. If Rumlow happened to be in the right spot with a sniper rifle, they were dead; but there was no alternative, and so Bucky had agreed to stand here in the open, snapping at Steve over some disagreement they conjured, as amused passersby skirted them and Bucky felt the target burning on Steve's back.

After five minutes Steve threw his hands in the air and went stomping off toward the apartment. Bucky stalked off in a different direction, following the route he'd committed to memory last night. This was another thing he hated, Steve's long, lonely walk through the dusk, but it was crucial that Rumlow pick up Steve's trail and believe that he was alone and vulnerable, that this night was the night to attack.

Bucky took a circuitous path back to the apartment. He ducked into several shops along the way to throw off a trail, just in case Rumlow had decided to follow him instead. When night had fallen and Bucky was sure he wasn't being trailed, he crept into their building under the cover of darkness.

An anxious part of Bucky was holding its breath as he came up the stairs, paranoid that Rumlow had worked more quickly than they'd anticipated and he'd open the door to find Steve in pieces. Instead, Steve was lying on the floor reading, head pillowed on a cushion he'd stripped from the couch. He'd also drawn the curtains across the lone exterior window in the bedroom, as well as the interior ones in the walls dividing the bedroom, kitchen, and living room, but Bucky knew how Hydra trained its operatives. You couldn't be too careful.

Bucky locked the door behind him and dropped to the floor beside Steve, out of the line of sight. “Any trouble?” he whispered.

Steve closed his book. “None so far. But here's hoping.”

“Okay. Lemme see it.”

Bucky's third or fourth mission with Rumlow was in the Gulf in 1990, sent to further destabilize an already volcanic situation through a precise series of assassinations. Rumlow wasn't yet the commander then, and he'd been assigned as Bucky's spotter. It had been just the two of them in the desert for days. Then it all went to shit, and Rumlow had taken a bad hit to the shoulder; during the next week, as they waited for an extraction that couldn't come, Rumlow's wound got infected, and then the infection spread. In the end, Bucky had half-carried him across the sand to their extraction point as he sweated and shook and swore. On the transport, the medics had given him an emergency shot of penicillin, and Rumlow had gone into anaphylactic shock.

They crawled across the kitchen to the bedroom door. Steve pointed to the doorknob. Hidden behind the handle was one of the stolen syringes. A drop of penicillin beaded at the tip.

“If he grabs the handle, he'll get pricked for sure, and if he turns it, it'll depress the plunger,” Steve explained quietly. “Anaphylaxis sets in within a few minutes.”

There was an identical trap on the bedroom window. No matter what Rumlow chose as his point of entry, he was fucked.

“Good,” Bucky whispered. “When he's down I'll use the chloroform, just to make sure. Then—” He smiled grimly. “The asshole's dead.”

They turned the lights out. Steve crawled into the bedroom, lumped up the covers to simulate a sleeping body, and lay a blond wig (a theft from Parsons) on the pillow. Then he came into the kitchen, closing the door carefully behind him, and opening the door that blocked off visibility into the bedroom.

After that, there was nothing to do but wait.

Bucky sat in the deep shadows behind the icebox; Steve was crammed, miserably, inside the tub with the table board over him. He had the chloroform bottle in one hand. Steve's least worthless kitchen knife in the other. A rag in his pocket. He kept running over those items in his mind, picturing leaping into action with them, trying to mentally rehearse the fluidity and power that came naturally to him in his enhanced body. If only he'd been smart enough to leave Rumlow for dead in the desert all those years ago.

The building breathed around them. There was a whispering harmony of nighttime sounds: the faltering hum of diminishing traffic; water gurgling in the pipes; the distant thudding as doors slammed; the creaking complaints of the building itself; all dwindling into a trickle of noise as the night deepened. In the darkness, even the car horns and police sirens and shouts from the sidewalk sounded hushed and far away.

Chloroform. Knife. Rag. Bucky ran his thumb along the edge of the blade.

Steve's quiet voice came out of the tub, distorted and muffled. “I don't like this.”

“That's sad,” Bucky said. “I'm thrilled about it.”

Steve was silent. After a minute had ticked by, Bucky said, “I know. It's rushed and anything could go wrong. If we could wait him out just a few more days, find a way to lure him somewhere secluded, get me a real rifle...”

“We're doing what we can,” Steve said. “We'll make it work.”

The moon rose over Brooklyn. Ghostly light fell into Steve and Bucky's kitchen in pale streaks. They waited in the gathering quiet.

In the hallway, something creaked.

All of Bucky's senses snapped online. He listened intently, tensed up behind the tub.

Another creak. It was a footstep, inching closer to their door. Bucky gripped his knife.

Something scraped in the lock. There was silence, then another scrape, and the door glided open on noiseless hinges. A footstep thumped inside their apartment. The bottom dropped out of Bucky's stomach. Rumlow was here, in their living room, standing next to the fold-out couch; it was real.

He couldn't open the chloroform yet or Rumlow might smell it, but he slowly drew the rag out of his pocket, and gripped the stopper.

Bucky heard the footsteps pace closer, then stop. The kitchen door creaked open.

He _felt_ Rumlow in the room; after so many missions working side-by-side Bucky knew him with the battle intimacy combat creates. He knew the way his weight shifted, and the rhythm of his breathing. Bucky clamped the rag over his own mouth. Silent. Be silent.

Rumlow stalked through the kitchen, past the tub where Steve was hiding, quiet as the grave. He edged into the field of Bucky's vision, a black cutout in the dim streetlights that fell through the bedroom windows. A blade glinted dangerously in his bare hand.

Rumlow reached for the bedroom door handle. Every muscle in Bucky's body readied itself –

– and then he stopped.

Bucky waited, frozen, breathless. What the hell was he doing?

Rumlow was staring through the interior windows into the bedroom, studying something with the predatory intensity of a hawk. What was he seeing in there? Bucky's stomach flipped. His mind raced through a thousand possibilities. Could he tell there was nobody under the covers? Was the blond wig too obviously fake? Had he seen the needle in the shadows?

Then, impossibly, like in a nightmare, Rumlow's hand lowered, and he turned away from the bedroom door.

What he would have done next would remain a mystery. As Rumlow turned around, his foot caught on the leg of a kitchen chair, and he stumbled forward. He caught himself quietly on the table board, but his weight landed too close to the edge, and the board slipped off the tub and crashed to the floor with an almighty racket.

Rumlow stood over the tub, knife in hand, staring down at Steve curled up inside.

For a moment, everything froze – and then Bucky launched himself from his hiding place on a wind out of hell. He smashed into Rumlow, knocking the blade out of his hand, and they both went reeling across the kitchen – Rumlow slammed up hard against the kitchen sink, and Bucky's knife flashed toward his throat, too slow. Rumlow knocked his arm to the side, grabbed his wrist, twisted it – Bucky cried out – and his knife went clattering harmlessly to the floor.

Rumlow seized Bucky by the throat and hauled him up. Bucky clawed at his scarred, gnarled hand, getting skin and blood under his fingernails, but his punishing grip didn't loosen. Instead, Rumlow yanked their faces close. He looked at Bucky with a contemptuous rage that made Bucky's insides curdle.

“You uppity little bitch,” Rumlow snarled, and hurled him backward. Bucky went crashing over a chair and fell to the floor, winded. The chloroform bottle skittered out of his hand.

Rumlow charged toward him, drawing a gun out of his pocket.

Steve flung himself in his path. The knife came flashing down again, Bucky's dropped knife that Steve had gathered up, and this time it hit its mark, scoring a deep slice in Rumlow's hand. He roared and dropped the gun; when it hit the ground it went off, shattering a lamp in the living room, and Steve kicked it across the room.

Bucky was struggling to his knees, gasping for breath. Steve stepped in front of him, faced Rumlow, and raised his knife.

“No, Steve,” Bucky groaned. “Get out of here.”

“No,” Steve said, never taking his eyes off Rumlow.

Rumlow chuckled. “C'mon, Cap. You know it's pointless.” He took a step forward.

Steve jabbed with the knife, and Rumlow hopped back again. Steve looked about three feet tall in front of his opponent, frail and breakable as a finger bone. Calmly, self-assured, he said, “You're wrong.”

Behind Steve, Bucky staggered to his feet, clutching at the rim of the tub for support.

Rumlow didn't even glance over. With the full force of his attention weighing on Steve, he said, “The vegetable was right. You should have run while you could. Why go to the wall for him, Cap? Don't you know what he did?”

The bottom dropped out of Bucky's stomach. Steve's knife didn't waver, but his shoulders stiffened.

Rumlow was grinning an awful grin. “You think he's your friend, your old pal? He didn't tell you what kind of person he really is?”

“Rumlow,” Bucky whispered.

Finally, Rumlow looked at him. His eyes burned into Bucky's.

The front door slammed open.

A man screamed, “Put your hands in the air!” The lights burst on, blinding Bucky for a second, and then four officers in knee-length blue coats poured into the apartment with their guns out. Steve and Bucky immediately stuck their hands up, although Bucky's body ached so ferociously he couldn't straighten up all the way; Steve let the knife slip from his fingers. Rumlow didn't move. He just stared at Bucky, even as two of the officers seized him by the arms and wrestled handcuffs on him.

One of the officers barked at Steve and Bucky, “Are you two boys the residents here?”

“Yes sir,” Steve said, hands above his head.

The officer turned his head. “Can you confirm that, ma'am?”

To Bucky's shock, Mrs. Walsh appeared in the doorway, her hair in rollers, wrapped in a fluffy pink robe. “Yes, officer, those young men are the lawful tenants. Steve Rogers and James Barnes.”

The officer turned back to them. “We got a call about a burglary. Is that the situation here?”

Steve and Bucky exchanged a glance.

“Yes,” they said in unison.

“Book him,” the officer said to the two holding Rumlow, and they hauled him into the hallway, out past the swelling crowd of whispering rubberneckers.

The cops took their statements – and, fortunately, it was easy to tell the same lie; all they had to do was neglect to mention that they were the ones who staged the ambush. As the police were going over the scene, Mrs. Walsh picked her way over to them. “I saw that nasty man picking your lock,” she explained, with a severe frown of disapproval. “I called the station right away. I work in records there, you know. You wouldn't believe the lowlifes in this town.”

It was another stroke of luck that the cops didn't go over the apartment too thoroughly, or they might have had some questions about the penicillin syringes hidden on the window and the doorknob. One of the officers did find the bottle of chloroform.

“He tried to use this on you boys?” he asked.

Bucky nodded.

The cop looked from Bucky, to Steve, to the bottle, and back to Steve.

“There are some weird folks out there,” the officer said gravely.

“Oh yes,” Steve agreed, and Bucky echoed, “Yes sir.”

After it was done, and the cops had cleared out, and the onlookers had been shooed back to their own apartments, Steve and Bucky clambered out the window to the fire escape, where they sat in stunned exhaustion. The sounds of three a.m. Brooklyn drifted up to them on the brisk nighttime breeze.

Bucky's legs were dangling over the street. He flopped forward and rested his face against the iron railing. Everything down to his bones was tired. “Is it over?” he mumbled. “Tell me it's over, Steve.”

Steve was frowning down at nothing, his face lined and tired in the wan streetlight. “I don't see why not,” he said, thinking out loud. “If we're right about me being the anchor, then in two days—” his face twisted and smoothed out in the space of a second “—our time here is up. If we're wrong...”

“Then we can always kill him later.” Bucky squished his cheek into the railing, his eyes slipping closed. God, he was tired.

“Exactly.”

They climbed inside. Bucky helped Steve get out the clanky old foldout bed, and then stumbled back to his own room, yawning. He collapsed face first into his pillow without bothering to even take his shoes off. Steve followed him in and leaned on the doorjamb. “We'll draw you a bath in the morning,” he said. “Your hair's a mess.”

Bucky cracked an eye open to glare at him. “Why are you talking shit about my hair?”

“Because you should tidy yourself up for Shabbat.”

Bucky groaned into his pillow. Steve had a threatening note of iron in his voice that let Bucky know, without any room for doubt, that come hell or high water they were both going over for dinner, and they were going with tidy hair.

“What the hell,” he mumbled.

Fine, why not – he'd meet his family. He'd suffered worse tortures than this.

 

 

_Bucky came to in his cell with a pounding headache and a deep throbbing pain in his stump. For a second, he felt the sick weight of dread in his body without remembering the cause, and then it all came back, the rescue, the capture,_ Steve _\--_

“ _Steve!” he screamed._

_He stumbled to his feet on the panicked energy of adrenaline. His wrist burned in the cuff. He staggered into the dark corners of his cell, terrified of seeing Steve collapsed there, but hoping for it too. He wasn't there. He was gone._

“ _Steve!”_

_Bucky flung himself at the door to his cell. It rattled in its hinges._

“ _Steve!” He slammed himself at the door again. The metal groaned. Bucky was beyond panic; he was blind, mad with terror. “Steve! Steve!_ Steve _!”_

_Abruptly, the door opened. Bucky fell through, interrupted mid-charge, straight into Lukin's chest. Lukin planted both hands on Bucky's shoulders and shoved him backwards; he crashed hard into the floor. The sudden pain shocked the insanity from his mind. Oh God, he'd been misbehaving, badly, kicking up a ruckus, he'd just about attacked Lukin. He scrambled to his knees and bowed his head in quiet submission, heart thumping._

“ _That's better,” Lukin snapped. “Good to see the attempted theft hasn't ruined you.”_

_Bucky bit his lip, mind racing. He had to risk the question. “Theft?”_

_Lukin's foot snapped out and caught him hard in the ribs. Bucky grunted, but kept his balance. “Idiot. The American tried to steal Hydra property.”_

_Bucky was Hydra property. He nodded as his mind whirred, clicking through ideas, possible solutions, anything to save Steve; he had to save Steve--_

“ _We'll be punishing him for that,” Lukin promised darkly._

“ _No!”_

_This time, the kick caught him in the jaw. Bucky fell on his ass, tasting blood in his mouth. “What was that?” Lukin barked._

“ _It wasn't his fault,” Bucky said. The burst of fear had lent him perfect clarity; he knew he had to do anything, whatever it took, to save Steve from the kind of punishment they doled out in this place. “It wasn't his fault, it was mine, I – I begged him to take me. I insisted. It wasn't theft, it was an escape attempt.” He squared his jaw and met Lukin's eyes. “Punish me. It was my fault. Don't hurt him; punish me.”_

_Lukin stared down at him. There was an odd expression around his eyes; almost like a dark smile. “So you've been very bad,” he stated._

_Bucky's gut clamped. “Yes,” he whispered._

“ _If it's not him,” Lukin said, and smiled, “then it's you,” and he stalked out of the cell. He slammed the door behind him, and all the lights went off._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Expect the third, final, and most agonizing chapter very soon!
> 
> The amazing artwork for this fic, by the lavishly talented [sgtjimbarnes](http://sgtjimbarnes.tumblr.com/)/[AngelDibs](http://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelDibs), can be found [here](http://sgtjimbarnes.tumblr.com/post/149669883981/bucky-steve-said-the-hard-edge-of-his-voice) (NB: spoilers for the final part). 
> 
> Please join me in my relentless sobbing on my [tumblr](http://ibroketuesday.tumblr.com/).


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please take extra heed of the torture warning for this chapter. There are depictions, and they are graphic.

_As near as he could count, they left Bucky in the pitch darkness for ten days._

_Early on he woke up and found that someone had placed a bowl of water near his head while he slept. He discovered it in the total blackness by jarring it with his hip. The bowl rocked, and water sloshed over the side. Bucky had been through this before, so he lapped up the fallen water from the floor with his tongue, like a dog. The remainder he rationed brutally, sipping in kittenish licks, even as his throat grew parched and his lips got so dry they bled._

_There was no food._

_Halfway through, the hallucinations started._

_By the time they came for him, he'd licked his bowl dry, he was limp from starvation, and he was raving. He tried to scream as the door opened and light flared in, but his throat was too dry for noise. Two soldiers hauled him to his feet and dragged him between them. They were taking him to the table. As they got closer, Bucky began to tremble, then to shake so hard one of the soldiers nearly dropped him. The other cursed and slapped Bucky across the face._

_When they wrestled him onto the table they strapped him down, which they hadn't needed to do for a long time._

_A woman stepped up to the table, her gray hair in a severe bun._

“ _I hear you tried to run away,” she chided him._

 _Still unable to speak, Bucky could only mouth,_ I'm sorry _._

“ _You have been very bad,” she said, and held up a cruelly hooked flensing knife._

_Bucky took a deep, shuddering breath, and fixed his eyes at his favorite spot on the ceiling._

_She flayed the soles of his feet off._

_After it was done, she held Bucky's sweaty head up and slowly fed him half a cup of water. He kept muttering_ thank you, thank you, thank you _between sips. When he was finished, she disappeared. He didn't worry for the first few minutes; he'd never been left on the table after a session was over. Any minute now she'd come back, unstrap him, and the soldiers would escort him to his cell._

_She didn't come back. His raw feet scabbed over and started to itch. Eventually, he fell asleep._

_He woke up to her standing over him, flensing knife in hand. This time, she took the tender skin on the stump where his arm used to be. Afterward she left him alone on the table again, and came back to hurt him again, and the nightmare continued._

_It was endless. Day in, day out; he screamed on the table, slept on the table, pissed himself on the table. She flayed his palm, his inner thighs, his balls, his stomach. He started to get friction sores from the straps and the cuffs._

_He got up the courage to ask about Steve._

“ _Have you seen him?” he asked, watching her wipe down her knife with rubbing alcohol before the star of the session. “The American?”_

“ _Yes. He is in the cell down the hall from yours.” She held the blade up to the light to inspect it._

_The fact that she'd seen him wasn't reassuring. “Has he been hurt?” Bucky said._

_She shook her severe head. “No. We've been given orders not to touch him.” She pressed down on his shoulder. “Lie still, now.”_

_The cruelest part was that the skin grew back. Zola's nightmare serum had made it so he couldn't scar. The new, pink skin was freakishly tender, and the woman set to work cutting it, burning it, stabbing it, and shocking it until Bucky was writhing open-mouthed but silent, no longer able to scream. Then she flayed the new skin off again, and the evil cycle kept going._

_He would have sold his soul to get off the table – not even for an impossible dream like freedom, but just to be put back in his cell, just to walk into the hallway. He knew not to hope this was a slow execution; there was no end in sight. She kept him alive dripping water into his open mouth and hand-feeding him small chunks of bread. He wished she would stop. He wished he would die._

_As she was taking the new skin off his stump, Lukin came in. He leaned against the wall, arms crossed casually, watching Bucky arch his back on the table._

“ _Please,” Bucky begged. “Please, please, please!”_

_The woman slapped him with her bloody hand. “No complaining.”_

“ _Please let me see Steve!” Bucky screamed._

_If he could just see him, touch him – know he was alright, be reminded he was real – then it would all be worth it. If he could just see Steve._

“ _I'll do anything,” he said. “Anything, a-anything.”_

_The woman peeled away a strip of pink flesh. The next “please” was nothing more than a long, low moan._

“ _You brought this on yourself,” Lukin said curtly. He turned on his heel and left._

_Bucky lost all sense of time. It could have been a century._

_The lights flickered dully over the table. Somewhere in the room, a fly was buzzing, a constant irritating drone. The very existence of Bucky's body was torture. His raw wounds stung and burned, his healing scabs itched like the devil, and his new skin was so sensitive the scrape of the straps against it was agony. His skin was a patchwork of torment. He wanted the comfort of his own, cramped, rank little cell so badly that his bones ached. He just wanted to obey, to be good. He couldn't do this anymore. He could not do it._

_The woman was standing by the table, sterilizing the flensing knife. Her cloth whisked up and down in a soothing rhythm; the blade gleamed cleanly behind it, shining with alcohol. Bucky's eyes followed the motion, up and down, up and down. He was a dull animal, half-dead._

_She came to his side. She peered down at him, and her hand came up – he flinched away, but she only touched her cool fingers, kindly, to his face. With shocking tenderness, she stroked the damp hair off his burning forehead. Bucky shut his eyes. A tear rolled down his cheek._

_Something cold touched the joint of his jaw, below his ear._

_His eyes sprang open. He could see the flensing knife, a silver blur in the corner of his eye._

_Pain lanced through him as she slid the tip of the blade into the soft flesh below his ear. Warm blood spilled down his neck. She began to drag the knife along his jawline toward his chin, carving a clean, deep slice._

“ _What are you doing?” Bucky gasped._

_She hovered over him, close as a surgeon, her face a mask of concentration. The blade sliced over his chin and kept cutting on the other side, following his jaw back up to his other ear. His chest and neck were awash in red._

“ _What are you doing?” he demanded in terror._

_She replied, matter-of-factly, “I'm taking your face.”_

_No. No, no, no – Bucky realized he was screaming it aloud, “No no no!” He fought against the straps like a wild animal, writhing and bucking. He dislocated his wrist in the cuff. The flensing knife slipped off his jerking head and jabbed deep into his cheek, barely missing his eye. The woman hissed and grabbed it away._

“ _Hold still!” she snapped._

“ _No!” Bucky howled. “Get away! Get away from me!”_

“ _What the hell is the meaning of this?” It was Lukin; he stood in the doorway, scowling, surveying the woman with blood dripping down her knife and Bucky, insane in his bonds, thrashing so hard the table shook._

“ _Get in there and hold him down,” Lukin commanded to someone in the hallway._

_Six soldiers rushed in. They grabbed at Bucky's body. The moment their hands touched him, he went limp. He picked up his head and screamed to Lukin:_

“ _Do it to Steve!”_

_Blood dripped off the woman's stilled knife. Lukin said, “What?”_

“ _Steve! It was Steve,” Bucky sobbed. “I was wrong before, I lied, he did try to steal me, I never wanted to escape. It's not my fault! It's Steve's! Do it to Steve, do it to Steve!”_

_There was silence, broken only by Bucky's heaving breaths._

_Lukin gestured. The soldiers stepped back. The woman put away her knife._

_They untied him. They led him to the medical station, where careful hands cleaned the healing wound along his jaw and washed away the blood that coated his neck. They gave him a shot of morphine. He floated between the soldiers on the way back to his cell, where he found a cot, not just an army blanket on the floor, a cot, with a quilt, and they brought him warm milk, and nothing hurt. He had warmth and softness. He had never felt this good, never in his life._

_Steve was on the table, getting his face cut off._

_Bucky burrowed into his cot and sobbed, deep, wracking sobs that felt like they were tearing something out of him – something precious, something vital. He screamed in agony. If he were a brave man he once thought he'd been, he would bang on the door until Lukin came, and he would demand to take Steve's place. He should rip his own face off. He felt like it had been ripped off anyway._

_He knew what he should do. But he simply could not bring himself to do it._

_So Bucky lay on his cot, in the comfort and safety he had bought, and hated himself._

 

 

_Bucky sat in a brightly-lit, white-walled room. He stared down at his own bony, pale hand, curled limply in his naked lap. Raw, weeping sores ringed his wrist where the cuff had chafed him; against his corpse-white skin, the lurid red was as stark as a bullet wound._

_Zola was sitting across from him._

“ _Sergeant Barnes,” he said. “It's been a long time.”_

_The inside of his mouth was tacky. He licked his chapped lips. “Please,” he said. It came out as barely more than a hoarse whisper. He tried again. “Please.”_

_Zola smiled smugly at him. “Please?” he echoed. “Please what, Sergeant Barnes? Do you intend to finish that sentence?”_

_Please – don't hurt Steve. But he couldn't bear what they would demand in exchange. He was too much of a desperate coward, a despicable traitor. He couldn't even bear to hear their offer again, knowing he would let Steve down. He dropped his eyes and didn't speak._

_The silence was broken by Zola's cruel laughter. He laid his arms on the armrests, a king in his throne. “I said it had been a long time,” he said. “Sergeant Barnes, do you know how long it's truly been?”_

_That was something Bucky tried not to think about. He stared at his lap, still as death._

_Zola leaned forward in his chair. “The year is 1954.”_

_Bucky's head snapped up._

“ _Oh yes! You must be confused.” Zola looked gleeful, as though confusing Bucky delighted him. His fingernails clicked on the armrest, tap tap tap. “Perhaps by your body's clock, you've been with us two years, even three. But did you think that all those times you went into the cryochamber you were only spending the night there? You slept for months at a time in the ice.”_

_It was too much to process. Bucky did not feel horror or anger; he only felt cold. He noticed, distantly, as if it belonged to someone else, that his hand had started to tremble._

“ _Nine years,” Zola said. Tap tap tap. “So much has changed while you've rotted away. For example, the Red Skull fell, I am a valued employee of the SSR, and you are an uncle.”_

_What? Bucky shook his head once, twice. “Uncle?” he managed._

“ _Yes, to a child you will never meet.” Zola shrugged, looking bored. “As they say, life goes on. Two of your sisters have married. The youngest girl,_ Devorah _, I believe, was struck by a car in an unfortunate accident in 1951 and is still bedridden. Your mother devotes her days to caring for her. They no longer come to your grave – perhaps it is too far to visit?” He spread his hands: what can you do? “Regarding your status as an uncle, one of your sisters is in a sadly childless marriage, and the other has a little boy. David. Hmm.” Zola frowned. “One would think she would have named him James.”_

_Bucky bowed his head._

_Somewhere in front of him, Zola said, with horrible false sympathy, “As you see, they have forgotten you.”_

_Bucky's hand came up, trembling, and latched onto his left arm above the stump. He hugged his arm close around himself._

_Zola reached under the table and brought up a stiff dark folder. He tapped it on the table, laid it down. Bucky's eyes tracked his hands. Zola neatly adjusted his white sleevecuffs, straightened the folder in line with the edge of the table, and crisply flicked the cover open. Bucky glimpsed the yellowed black-and-white of old cut-out newspaper articles inside._

_Zola picked up the top article with his fingertips and slid it out of the folder. The paper rustled, loud as a snake hiss in the dead air. Zola pushed the article across the table to Bucky._

_He looked down straight into Steve's eyes._

_It had been a long time since he'd read English, so it took a moment for his brain to arrange the headline into comprehensibility, and even then it didn't make sense:_

_CAPTAIN AMERICA MISSING IN ACTION, PRESUMED DEAD_

_Bucky blinked hard. The letters didn't rearrange themselves. He shook his head._

“ _Captain Rogers died in 1945,” Zola said._

“ _No,” Bucky rasped._

_Another cutting whispered out of the folder and across the table to Bucky._

_Another picture of Steve, looking serious, below another grim headline: SEARCH FOR MISSING HERO CALLED OFF AFTER WEEKS_

“ _He's alive,” Bucky said. “He's_ here _!”_

“ _Captain Rogers hijacked the Red Skull's plane soon after we retrieved you,” Zola said calmly. “He crashed into the sea and died in the icy waters of the Atlantic.”_

“ _I saw him!” Bucky yelled._

_Zola spilled the rest of the folder over the table. Aged yellow articles slid everywhere, a great confusion of urgent announcements from countless publications in English, German, Russian. Portraits of Steve overlapped each other, jumbled with images of huge crowds gathered at a memorial, and Peggy Carter in funeral clothing, and even old pictures of Bucky himself. NATION MOURNS FALLEN SON. REMEMBERING CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE LIFE, THE LEGEND. CAPTAIN AMERICA OFFICALLY DECLARED DEAD._

_Zola said, “Your friend has been dead for nine years.”_

“ _I saw him,” Bucky whispered. “I saw him, I--” held him, kissed him--_

_Zola clasped his fingers together. “You saw only what we wanted you to see,” he said, satisfied, “thanks to a mild hallucinogenic, Dr. Ivchenko's hypnotic suggestion, and a blond, blue-eyed soldier, who, by the way, was quite disgusted to learn of the extent of your perversions.”_

_Bucky's head felt like it was full of air. At the back of his mind, someone, somewhere, was wailing. He touched the scattered papers with a trembling hand. His finger landed on a portrait of Steve's face together with his own: NATIONAL ICON DIES AVENGING LOYAL FRIEND_

“ _A wasted sacrifice, for a man like you,” Zola commented coolly. Bucky flinched. “A coward. A turncoat. A man who would turn his lifelong friend over to be tortured. They tell me you begged them to hurt him.”_

_He was watching Bucky closely._

“ _So this is James Buchanan Barnes,” Zola said. “This is who he is.”_

_There was not an atom in Bucky's body that had the strength to deny it._

_With finality, gently, Zola looked Bucky in the eye and said, “I think it best that such a man should be forgotten.”_

_Bucky, at last, could only nod._

 

 

_Finally, after nine years, they began to interrogate him. What's your name? Rank? Number? What year were you born? Where are you from? To each question, Bucky responded, “I don't know.” Because it wasn't true, they took a riding crop to him. They screamed in his face that he was a liar. They called him worthless; a waste. He believed them. That was what he was. They asked him why he was trying to hold on to his worthless life, but the truth was he would have given anything to let it go._

 

 

_Lying in the dark, on the rough cold floor, Bucky's life came back to him. The memories came up unbidden: in school, clouds of chalk billowing out as he clapped the erasers together, tickling his nose; mud squishing in his boots as his unit trudged through the forests of Austria; playing with Rebecca's wispy hair, his mother's arm around him, listening to Devorah recite the four questions during Seder; shuffling papers in the musty back office where he clerked. He crushed the images down. It all had to go, his history, his family – and Steve. Steve was a golden thread running through the tapestry of memories. Screaming next to Steve as the rollercoaster dropped, pressed against him in the crowd on a rattling streetcar, Steve safe under his scope on the battlefield, Steve's hand falling away from his on an icy mountain, his first kiss, the unexpected wetness of Steve's mouth on his, Steve's bony hips under his hands, Steve's fists in Bucky's shirt. The blazing spirit of goodness in Steve, Steve who was dead, who had died a hero, whose memory Bucky had betrayed, whose love Bucky now knew for sure he didn't deserve._

_He stamped Steve down with all the rest. He buried him, so deep no one would ever be able to reach him, and then he lay his own life down beside him, knowing that it had to end here. Here in the dark, at last, Bucky finally killed himself._

 

 

_He woke up a stranger._

_They asked him, “What's your name?”_

“ _I don't know,” he said._

_They believed him. They could tell it was true._

 

 

_Golden summer sunlight shone down. It warmed the back of his shoulders through his shirt and he tilted his face toward the cloudless sky, soaking up the sun like he'd been starved for it. He sat with his arm draped over his bent knee, perched on the graceful slope of a grassy hill. The open countryside unrolled in front of him, endless fields of green grass that flowed over the gentle hills. A tranquil breeze sighed in the rustling trees._

_A flock of birds darted overhead, winging their way to the blue horizon. He watched them go with interest. He'd been here for several hours. His owners had brought him up from underground, taken him a long way in the back of a big black car, and ordered him to walk to this hill. He had done so, and from his vantage point he watched their car speed away and vanish over the horizon. Then he sat down to wait. His orders had been to stay put until retrieval. His body told him to obey them. Although no one was there to stop him from walking away, he sat where they'd put him. No other option occurred to him._

_His stomach rumbled. He propped his chin on his hand and watched a bee crawl over the bobbing bright head of a wildflower._

_A while later, movement among the trees caught his attention. He turned his head, and watched alertly as two men emerged. Even from this distance, he could discern that he knew them; the handler with the black hair and square jaw, and the pudgy little scientist with the round glasses. They were here to retrieve him. He sat up straighter. They came swiftly across the field, and once they started up the hill, strains of their conversation reached his sharp ears._

“ _\--effective,” the handler was saying. “But was it necessary?”_

“ _Of course it was necessary,” said the scientist._

“ _I've never seen why. Development of the device is coming along well.”_

“ _You fail to understand the immense regenerative capabilities of the serum. The device shall remove his memories after missions, yes.” The scientist was puffing as they toiled up the hill. “But when he is two weeks in the field, far from base, his brain knitting itself back together, and he remembers his original loyalties, what then?”_

“ _I see.”_

“ _Yes – there had to be something deeper – an unbreachable wall --”_

_They crested the hill. The scientist fumbled a handkerchief from his pocket and smeared the sweat from his brow. The handler folded his arms._

“ _Stand up,” he commanded._

_He rose fluidly to his feet, his whole attention on his owners. He felt good, focused, now that there were clear orders to obey._

_The handler looked him up and down with a critical expression. “We have important work for you to do,” he said._

_His nerves zinged with readiness. He kept his expression neutral and receptive._

_The handler beckoned. “Come this way.”_

_He followed them back the way they had come, down the hill and into the trees. It was pleasantly cool in the sun-dappled shade underneath the branches, and leaf litter crunched beneath their feet. They walked through the woods for a while, finally emerging into a clearing where the big black car sat idling. A soldier leaned against the hood, smoking. At his feet knelt a man, blindfolded and cuffed. The man's chest was heaving with fear._

_The handler strolled up to the car and tilted his head at the bound man. “Kill him.”_

_He stepped forward with no hesitation. Hesitation was unthinkable._

_It was over quickly and quietly._

_He let the man's neck slip from his arm. The trees groaned around him in the wind._

“ _Well, well,” the scientist murmured. “You will be a great asset for Hydra.”_

_The handler nodded in crisp satisfaction. “Well done.”_

“ _Thank you,” the asset said._

 

 

“This is torture,” Bucky complained. “And I should know!”

So far this afternoon, Bucky had been obligated to take a bath in the kitchen while Steve sat in the living room, primly faced away – which was nothing, really, after getting hosed off with icy water, Hydra's favorite bathtime ritual, but he still didn't _like_ it – and then get dressed in an outfit Steve picked out, which consisted of dark gray pants and jacket with a blue shirt, and then endure Steve fretting about the lurid purple fingerprint bruises on his neck. Now Steve was patiently coaching him in the application of Brylcreem in his hair.

At one point, Bucky had lost his mind, crying in panic, “Steve, I'm not him, I can't be him, I don't know how,” to which Steve responded, “Well, today you're going to pretend.”

“It's not torture, Bucky, Jesus. Just...” Steve mimed running a comb through his hair. “Just please keep doing that.”

On the subway over, Steve quizzed him like a kid studying for a history test.

“Your ma's name?”

“Winifred.”

“Your sisters are?”

“Rebecca's the oldest after me, Devorah's the baby, and the middle one is, uh... Edith.”

Steve winced. “Judith. But call her Judy.”

Bucky sighed and collapsed against his seat. “This is a terrible idea. They're going to find out.”

“No, they won't,” Steve said. “Who'd be able to guess?”

 

 

The Barnes family apartment was on a second-floor hallway. Steve knocked on the door.

From inside, a little girl's voice shrieked out, _“Bucky!”_

Bucky grimaced, and Steve cast him a stern look.

The door swung open with a squeak of well-worn hinges. A tall woman stood there in a plain blue dress, her gray-streaked dark hair pinned up neatly, with a few wispy curls straying out around her ears. Her lined face was warm with a smile. Looking at her, Bucky felt deep thrum of resonance, and was arrested.

“Gut shabbos, sweetheart,” she said, and then, her attention passing from Bucky like a fire being extinguished, “and hello Steve!”

“Hello, Mrs. Barnes,” Steve said, with a strange note in his voice. Bucky cast him a sideways glance and was rocked to see Steve's eyes glistening over a huge smile.

A small dark head thrust out from behind the folds of Mrs. Barnes' skirt. “ _Bucky_ ,” the girl shouted again, and hurled herself into Bucky's arms. On instinct, Bucky caught her and swooped her up into his arms. Then, unsure what to do next, he froze, and stayed frozen, holding her perched against his chest, her fluffy dress puffing over his arms, as she wrapped her little arms around him and snuggled her round face into his neck. Her damp breath gusted on his cheek. The weight of her in his arms was so sweetly familiar it hurt.

The name came to him out of nowhere. Devorah, of course, this was the baby, but everyone called her-- “DeeDee,” he said, wonderingly.

“Can we play horses?” DeeDee said into his ear.

“Maybe later.” Mrs. Barnes plucked the child away from Bucky and set her on the floor. “Bucky, Steve, come in and set the table, why don't you?”

The apartment was a little larger than Bucky and Steve's, but it was so overflowing with life it felt half the size. The door opened onto a narrow hallway; two bedrooms sat on the far end, and the kitchen was at Bucky's left. The kitchen door stood propped open, and the oven was on, radiating warmth; a sweet, good smell suffused the air. Mrs. Barnes led them to the right, to the dining room. Half the space was dominated by a handsome table of dark glossy wood, a real, actual table, not the board and tub setup Steve and Bucky had. The other half of the room held couches and chairs that were clustered cozily together, draped in blankets. Several lines of dry laundry stretched from wall to wall, waiting to be taken down. The radio was playing traditional music that Bucky recognized from somewhere, the walls were lined with cupboards that were bursting with things, a half piano stood against the wall. Bucky shifted on his feet. He wasn't sure where to put his hands. Just standing here in this comfortably chaotic home made him feel misplaced and invasive; as though it was a target's house he'd infiltrated as the Winter Soldier, a monstrous misfit in the warmth.

A girl wearing a sweet pink dress – Edith – no, Judith – was doing an uninspired job of dusting around a vase of fresh flowers on the windowsill. When she saw them, she blushed a deep red and almost dropped the duster. “Gut shabbos, Steve!” she squeaked, ignoring Bucky.

“Oh, gut shabbos, _Steeeve_ ,” Rebecca echoed unkindly as she hurried past, her arms full of cloth. “Ma!” she screamed at Mrs. Barnes, who had climbed up a chair to start unpinning laundry. “There's a stain on the linens! The good linens!”

“Cover it up with somebody's plate, honey, I'm busy.”

Steve and Bucky got efficiently roped in to setting the table. They spread out the linen tablecloth under Rebecca's stain-disguising direction, and then laid out the fine china, candlesticks, and wine. Rebecca handed him a beautiful silver kiddush cup that he hesitated to take -- it felt wrong for him to handle these things that were important to their family; he didn't have the right.

“How's work lately?” Rebecca asked as they were laying out the plates.

“Um,” Bucky said. What the hell did he do for a living? “Fine.”

“What about that guy Benny? Is he still giving you trouble?”

Bucky's eyebrows drew down. “...No.”

Rebecca nodded. “You know what I really love about you, Bucky? Listening to your great stories.”

DeeDee ambled over with the napkins. "Up!" she demanded, raising her chubby little arms. Bucky looked around; everyone else was busy. Bucky swung her into his arms. She wriggled her little body snug against his. God, she didn't know he was dangerous -- none of them could tell. He took her around to all the place settings, dipping her down so she could drop a napkin at each one.

Little fingers poked at the tender spots on Bucky's neck. Big-eyed with concern in his arms, DeeDee said, “What happened?”

Bucky said, “Uh,” and looked at Steve for help. Before Steve could intervene, Judy noticed what was going on, and then Mrs. Barnes was there. She took Bucky's jaw in her hand, gently, and tilted his face so she could study the bruises – Bucky's shoulders tightened up even as warmth flooded him.

Steve told a highly abbreviated version of the attack the night before. Bucky was silent. He knew he shouldn't be; even though Steve was telling the story, the women kept looking over at him with deep worry, and he could allay their concerns with a word. A joke. Some offhand comment to convince him he was the Bucky they knew, and that he was fine. But he couldn't; his mind was as blank and buzzing as right after a wipe.

“He's still a little shook up,” Steve said.

Mrs. Barnes ushered him over to an armchair. “You sit down, Bucky, we'll take care of the rest,” she said, and walked away, muttering something to herself that sounded like, “I'll find out where that man is and I'll kill him.”

Bucky stayed curled in his chair, watching the chaos in the apartment like it was happening on another world. And in a way, it was. It wasn't his world, and he didn't know them. They were no different from the people in 2016 who recognized him from the news.

The afternoon bled into a reddening evening. Mrs. Barnes and Rebecca worked in the kitchen, visible in flashes of motion across the hallway, and the entire apartment was spiced with the smell of food. Judy was finally relieved of cleaning duty and retired, quiet and shy, to the couch, where she watched Steve get roped into playing horses with DeeDee. Bucky didn't think about much.

After a while, the clattering noises from the kitchen stopped, and Mrs. Barnes came back into the room. “We're just waiting on the challah now,” she announced. She walked over to Bucky, settled herself on the arm of his chair. “Bucky, would you play?”

“Sure,” Bucky said. Steve could probably use a break from DeeDee.

Then he saw Steve's eyes widening. Steve was clambering off the rug, shaking his head. When he saw he had Bucky's attention, he tilted his head, meaningfully, at the piano.

Bucky's brain stalled.

“Uh,” he said. “I mean—”

“C'mon, Bucky,” Rebecca said. She was leaning in the doorway, arms crossed. “You haven't been around for Shabbat for ages. It's the least you could do.”

So Bucky found himself parked on the piano bench, staring down at the meaningless array of black-and-white keys. He looked at the circle of people watching him expectantly with expressions of increasing concern. It was like a nightmare. He touched the tip of his forefinger to the piano, but it was no use. Like the rest of this life, it was gone, cut surgically and irreversibly away.

Then Steve settled down the bench next to him. He gave Bucky a reassuring smile. “Bucky was teaching me this one,” he called to the Barnes family. “I'm a disaster, though, let's see...” He set his hands on the keys, and then muttered, “No, no,” and shifted them over one.

The first few notes filled the air, slow and haunting, sweet and melancholy. It was a song Bucky knew. His eyes slipped closed. He couldn't bring to mind the name, or where he'd heard it – but the music resonated inside him, like the first time his handlers would hand him his own weapon after a wipe and his hands and mind would simply know it.

Then the next note jarred, discordant, and the music stopped. Steve was staring down at his hands like they'd betrayed them. “I think that was wrong,” he said.

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “It's supposed to be like...” and he set his hands on the same keys Steve had touched.

He hit the first note, and his hands knew the song.

Stumbling at first, and then with increasing finesse, Bucky played. He didn't know the next note until he had played the one before it; he couldn't think about it, or his hands would fumble, because this was beyond conscious thought or memory. This was drilled into his bones. For years, the boy Bucky had been had practiced on the family piano, picking his way through complicated pieces, putting on stumbling recitals for his proud mother, training himself to play fluently and gracefully, until the music was a part of his body in a way nothing could erase. It was Bucky's inheritance. It was his gift to himself, handed down through time, a chain that came through the black veil of nothingness in Bucky's mind, tying him inescapably to whatever lay beyond it.

Bucky's hands faltered. They slipped from the keys as the last notes vibrated out of the air. Steve was looking at him with a broken expression.

The smell of burning wafted in.

“The challah!” Mrs. Barnes exclaimed, and raced into the kitchen.

The sun slipped toward the horizon. DeeDee was sent to turn all the lights off. They congregated at table, and Mrs. Barnes lit the candles, saying the blessing. Bucky found himself mouthing along: _baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinuh melech ha'olam._ Rebecca recited the kiddush over the wine, and Judy uncovered the challah, faltering her way through her prayer as Mrs. Barnes watched, smiling in pride; at the end they all murmured, “Amen,” and the bread was broken apart and passed around. It tasted sweet and right.

Dinner was served. Bucky had eaten all over the world since his escape; this fare was nothing remarkable, and yet it was somehow the best he'd ever had. He made an effort to sit up straight and eat like a person, not a starving animal. The candlelight cast a warm halo around the table; Steve's hair shone a rich gold, and the light flickered in the dark hair and gray-blue eyes that all the Barnes women had, just like Bucky.

After they had eaten, Mrs. Barnes said, “Now then. Our last blessing for tonight.”

“Aw, ma,” Rebecca sighed. “Every week?”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Barnes said. “Every week.”

Rebecca touched her tightly pinned curls. “Well, be careful with my hair this time.”

Mrs. Barnes rose. The older girls were sitting together, with DeeDee at the head of the table where Mrs. Barnes could help her with her food. All three of them bowed their heads, and Mrs. Barnes touched her hands to their hair, placing a gentle kiss on Judith's head in the middle. “For my daughters,” she said. “May God make you as Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah.”

She came around the table. Bucky realized what was about to happen; he bowed his head, and his eyes slid closed as both of his mother's warm hands cradled his head. “For my son,” she said above him. “May God make you as Ephraim and Menassah.”

Their heads remained bowed as Mrs. Barnes went to the head of the table, encompassing all her children. “May God bless you and care for you,” she said. “May the light of God's countenance shine upon you and be gracious to you. May God's countenance be lifted upon you and give you peace.”

Bucky rose from the table. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and fled.

He went into one of the bedrooms at random and sank onto the bed and pressed his hands to his aching face.

Bucky had spent so long running from the person he'd been, the monster, the traitor. The past was dead, and thank God for that. There was nothing else except moving forward; it was the only way to survive. But now, for the first time, the trajectory of the life that would have been opened up before him. There used to be a natural path he'd been meant to take, and he could see it so clearly. He hadn't just decided to step away from the life that belonged to him. Hydra had ripped it away, and the loss of the would-have-been ached deeply, like a phantom limb.

And the people out there, his family, they would never be able to understand the wretched depravity of the path his life had taken instead. How could they ever imagine the horror worse than death he'd fallen into? To them, he was immutably and eternally that normal boy he'd been meant to be. How could they know it was possible to carve out the core of a person's self? They couldn't picture it happening to Bucky. They'd never believe that the boy they loved had been taken apart and reshaped into a thing, something whose mind was so crippled it couldn't conceptualize disobedience, or dignity, or itself as a person. They didn't know that those fundamental parts of being were things a person could lose. They didn't know what it was like to be owned down to the atom.

They thought Bucky was like them; they would think he'd been meant to be whole too.

And then there was Steve.

Steve knew the outlines of it. But he didn't know what Bucky had done.

A warm presence filled the doorway. Light footsteps crossed the room, and the bed creaked as a new weight settled down beside Bucky. His mother's arm came up around his shoulders. He caught a whiff of her sweet perfume, and he knew it. It resonated deep down inside him.

“Sweetheart, what on earth is wrong?” she asked.

“Ma,” he mumbled, and let her tug him into her side. She cupped his head, pressed his face into her shoulder, and rocked him like a child.

Bucky closed his eyes and wondered if it was the dead boy inside him who just wanted his mother. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And a special thank you goes out to George Orwell.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be advised that this chapter depicts grief over the death of a loved one.

The lights flickered on in their Oak Street apartment.

Bucky had been quiet and somber the whole ride back. A headache was mounting behind his eyes. The moment they were inside, Bucky threw himself into the couch and ground at his aching temples.

Steve was slipping off his shoes, watching him.

“Are any of them still alive?” Bucky said to the floor.

“No,” Steve admitted.

Bucky barked out a bitter laugh. Figured.

“Devorah would only be eighty-three,” he said. “But she had poor health.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bucky said. “Car crash.”

Steve gave him a sharp look.

Bucky tossed him a sarcastic little smile. He got up and paced – where? There was nowhere to go in this tiny cramped stupid little apartment. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, right where Rumlow had thrown him to the ground like a piece of trash. His head pounded.

Steve came into the kitchen. He settled back against the sink, his eyes on Bucky. “Tomorrow's the last day in 1937,” he said. “Time'll reset.”

“And?”

“And we could see them again, if you wanted. Help your ma out around the house, maybe take the girls out after Shabbat's over—”

“No,” Bucky said.

“Bucky,” Steve said, with horrible gentleness in his voice, “they're dead. When we get back, that's it, you'll never see them again. These might be the only memories you ever have of them—”

“I said no!” Bucky screamed. He kicked a chair over and it went clattering the ground, shockingly loud in the abrupt silence. Steve leaped backward in surprise.

Bucky stood with his chest heaving, fists clenched.

Steve was staring at him with a flat, angry gaze. “What the hell is your problem?”

“My problem,” Bucky yelled, “is that you're an idiot!” He jabbed a finger at Steve. “What do you think has changed? You think we're gonna land in 2016 and we'll hug, and it'll be just like it was back in the good old days?” His head throbbed. “I'm never gonna be him! He's dead, and good riddance!”

“Don't say that,” Steve said lowly.

“Don't say what?” Bucky got up close to Steve; Steve squared up his sharp shoulders. “Good riddance. Your friend was a coward and a traitor. He deserved to die.”

Steve's stance softened suddenly. “No, you don't.”

Bucky laughed. “What the hell do you know about me?”

Steve's chin lifted. “I know who you are.”

Bucky was shaking his head. Every movement hurt. Every beat of his damnable heart sent pain arcing through his head, all the way down to his spine. “No you don't. You don't know.” He gripped his head. “You don't know.”

Steve took a step closer, and Bucky stumbled back. “What don't I know, Bucky?”

“You don't know what I did.”

Even as the words left his mouth, terror gripped him. He had sworn to take the secret and the shame to his second grave, but he had also sworn to keep his distance from Steve, protect Steve from himself, and look how well that had worked out – but Steve _couldn't_ find out – but Steve was coming closer, steady, relentless, saying, “What did you do?”

The headache lifted. Either his heart stopped beating, or raced so hummingbird fast the beats blended together. From somewhere above his body, heady with fear and relief and release, Bucky says, “I sold you out.”

Steve stopped. From the look on his face, that wasn't the answer he was expecting.

“I betrayed you,” Bucky said, numbly. He wasn't in his body. His body was standing in the kitchen, hand clenched hard around the opposite wrist, scoring gouges. He had pieced it together from his frayed, dull memories of those first nine years of torture, which were the only dead particles of Bucky Barnes that had ever floated up past the unbreachable wall Zola built. He had sworn never to tell. “They tricked me. Made me think you were there. I let you take my place. I _begged_ them to torture you.”

He couldn't look at Steve. He could barely stand to listen to Steve's uneven breathing. “You thought your friend was a good person,” he muttered. “But I never was. They broke me open. Turned out there was nothing inside.”

“Oh, Buck,” Steve said, his voice was full of compassion.

That did it. Bucky crashed down into his body and all the terror and pain it carried; and he broke, and just as he had on the first day here, ran for the door. It was unlocked. He ran for the stairwell, and took the stairs up and up.

He burst onto the roof. The door rebounded against the jamb and swung wildly, screeching in its hinges. Bucky went pacing in a furious circle around the great central airshaft that plunged down the center of the roof. God, what had he done? Blindly, he threw himself to the ground. Steve knew. Whatever false assumptions he'd held about the kind of man Bucky was were well and truly shattered now. Bucky pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. Yeah, Steve was probably down there making plans for when he got back to the future, writing a mental note to himself to get Bucky kicked off the team right away.

Abruptly, all Bucky's mindnumbing fear drained away, leaving in its wake a kind of weary grief. He'd done this to himself. If Steve never wanted to see him again, then that was what he deserved.

Bucky sniffed and knuckled at his eyes. His face felt raw with cold; a bitter breeze plucked at his thin shirt. He was sitting with his back to a low brick wall, which blocked off the deep, perilous airshaft. He had made his way around to the other side of the stairwell housing he'd exploded out of, and where the wall abutted the housing, they formed a sheltered corner. That was where Bucky had flung himself. He leaned back against the rough bricks, slinging his arms over his knees. There was a good view of the city from up here. In the day, the jagged roofscape of Brooklyn would spread out before him. Now, in the dark of night, the walls and water towers and stepped chimneys melted into the black sky, invisible except for the galaxy of electric lights that studded the darkness. Luminescent windows climbed through the night like golden fireflies. Above the innumerable city lights, a stubborn handful of bright stars shone, refusing to be drowned out.

It was a city like any other. If Steve told him to get out, he could survive in there until time reset.

Bucky let his head thunk on to the wall. As he moved, he caught some small detail out of the corner of his eye – something in the brickwork, something wrong. He swiveled his head and stared. Yes, one of the bricks by his elbow was almost imperceptibly out of place, jutting slightly forward from the others.

Somehow, Bucky knew to reach over, dig his fingernails into the crumbly edge of the brick, and pull it out. It came out with a loud scraping noise and a brief shower of grit. Inside the deep hole it had left behind, Bucky could see the faint outline of jumbled objects.

Drawn, Bucky scooted closer. Was this an invasion of privacy? Aw, hell; all of this would be like it never happened once time reset. He shoved his hand into the hole. It was deeper than the brick – probably the work of whatever vandal had stashed their stuff in here. Bucky groped around. The biggest thing in there, taking up most of the space, was a thin paperback book. Bucky ran his fingers over the pages. They had been thumbed through so often the edges were worn soft. He set it aside.

The rest of the loot from the hidey-hole looked like a lot of junk: a smooth white stone that Bucky rubbed his thumb over, crumpled ticket stubs to a ball game, a pack of cigarettes, a box of matches, some comic strips cut out from the funny pages, a faded doodle on torn-out paper, a little nub of pencil, a half-finished crossword puzzle. Bucky looked over the treasure, a strange tugging feeling in his chest. The cold wind ruffled the papers, and he shuffled them together and stuffed everything back in the hole.

Except the book. That, he picked up. He turned it over in his hands. It was called, intriguingly, _Pirates of Venus_. He opened it to the title page, where his eye fell on the familiar neat handwriting in the upper corner, and his breath caught in his throat:

_Dear Bucky,_

_This seems stupid but that's your kind of thing. Have fun & Happy 17th Birthday _

_Love, Steve_

Bucky sat next to his own stash of little treasures, his own book in his numb hands. He read the note over and over again: _Love, Steve_.

On the other side of the stairwell housing, the door creaked open, and the glow cut across the rooftop. Light footsteps sounded, headed unhesitatingly around the housing, and in a second Steve rounded the corner, his face set into an expression of determination. The glow from inside limned his hair in angelic gold. Bucky looked up at him, and felt a sudden desperation, like a lost ship glimpsing a lighthouse on the shore.

Steve stepped out of the light, and settled himself down next to Bucky, in the shadows of his shelter. Bucky hunched in on himself. He watched Steve from the corner of his eyes.

“I knew I'd find you here,” Steve said.

Bucky twitched his face toward Steve. He stared at the book in his hands as he asked, “I used to come up here?”

Steve smiled sadly. “Whenever you got upset, you'd go stomping off to the roof. You said if we had to brood in the same apartment, we'd kill each other.”

Bucky eyed him.

“You were joking,” Steve said.

Bucky shrugged. He fiddled with the book, folding and unfolding one of the dog-eared pages, wishing that Steve would get it over with already and kick him to the curb; and at the same time, now that Steve was sitting next to him, his warmth at Bucky's side, Bucky was desperately afraid of being thrown away, no matter how much he deserved it.

[“Bucky,” Steve said. The hard edge of his voice demanded Bucky's attention, and Bucky straightened his shoulders as he raised his head. Steve was sitting casually crosslegged, but he looked at Bucky with the intensity of a sniper at his scope. His jaw was firm with determination. “Listen. What you said before – whatever you did when they had you. None of it matters. You're a good man."](http://sgtjimbarnes.tumblr.com/post/149669883981/bucky-steve-said-the-hard-edge-of-his-voice)

A sick chill washed over Bucky. He laughed, bitterly, tucking his hands up into his armpits. “Sure. Tell that to everyone I killed.”

Steve's eyes softened; his jaw worked for a moment before he spoke. “Bucky, that wasn't you.”

Bucky pulled his right hand away from his chest and held it out. It was a young hand, not the shriveled thing starvation had withered it into during his torture, healthy, bony at the knuckles, soft where rifles and pistols and knives would later leave calluses. “You've fired a gun,” Bucky said, glancing over to Steve, who was studying him intently. “You know there's a kick, like it comes alive. And knives, did you fight with knives? Or train with them?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know – knives have a weight to them, a balance. They warm to your skin, they feel good to hold. And when I--” Bucky swallowed, convulsively. His throat closed; his hand clenched and unclenched where he held it in the air. For a moment, he thought he wouldn't be able to continue, and then he forced himself to. “I could feel their bodies through the knife, the weight, the pressure against the blade. The blood running over my hand.”

“Bucky,” Steve said softly.

“I strangled a few of them,” Bucky said. His head was throbbing with mounting pressure behind his eyes. “Strangling someone is hard work. They clawed at me, or – or writhed, tried to throw me off. I had to pin them down, or hold them tight to me. I could feel them weaken as I killed them. When they were dead they'd sag in my arms and I'd drop them like trash.” He flexed his fingers. “I could feel their throats in my hand, warm, the heartbeat--” Finally overcome, Bucky pressed the heel of his hand to his throbbing aching forehead, like trying to staunch a wound, and said, from behind the shelter of his hand, “ _I_ killed them. I can still feel it.”

“Okay,” Steve said. His voice sounded odd, stilted, thick. “Okay.”

“Don't tell me it wasn't me.” Bucky ground his palm into his forehead.

“I won't,” Steve promised. “But even though you did those things, Bucky – that wasn't who you were.”

Bucky groaned out a laugh. “Trust me, pal, that was me all over.”

“No,” Steve said calmly. “You didn't have a choice. You think I'm gonna look at the things you did as a result of torture and say yeah, that's the real Bucky right there?”

Bucky shuddered. His other hand went to his face, and he pressed both palms into his hot skin like he could physically tamp down the swelling of the clamoring emotion inside him. It took a long time to speak. Finally, he gritted out, “I should have fought harder.”

Close at his side, Steve said, “No one could have held out against the things they did to you.”

“I should have,” Bucky whispered.

“It would have been impossible,” Steve said.

“It doesn't matter!” Bucky said. “I don't care if it was impossible. I should have done it.” He scratched his fingernails into his scalp. “I should have held out until they had to kill me.”

“I forgive you,” Steve said.

Bucky dropped his hands. He stared at Steve, at Steve's determined jaw, the firm set of his mouth, his fiercely blue eyes. His small shoulders were set square. He radiated earnestness, but – “I betrayed you,” Bucky said.

“I forgive you,” Steve repeated. His gaze was locked with Bucky's. “If you can't forgive yourself, I forgive you. You're a good man. If you don't believe it, I'll believe it for you.”

Bucky stared at him.

“I know you,” Steve continued. “I know who you are. The rest, we'll figure out as it comes. Okay?”

Bucky tried to speak. Nothing came out. He opened his mouth and forced sound out of his tight throat: “Okay,” he said, voice cracking.

“Okay,” Steve agreed, firm and authoritative. He clambered to his feet and stood there, in the thin light reflecting from the open doorway. He scowled and brushed dirt off the seat of his pants. His jacket fit badly around the shoulders, but it was good material, the best in his wardrobe; he had selected it specially, wanting to look nice for Bucky's family. His floppy hair fell into his lovely blue eyes. He looked so human, and so young, and the lines of his face were achingly familiar in a way that had called to Bucky when he knew nothing and was nothing. Bucky found himself still staring when Steve reached out his hand. Bucky took it. Steve's palm was dry and warm against Bucky's skin; the heat shocked through him. Steve pulled him to his feet – he was slight, but had strength where it counted.

When Steve started to slip his hand free, Bucky, unthinking, tightened his grasp. Steve glanced sharply up at him. Something firmed in his expression, and he twined his fingers into Bucky's.

He led Bucky to the stairs. The wind toyed with his hair, but he no longer felt the cold.

They went down to their floor, hand in hand. The skin contact was almost too intense, like a burn that cut away all other sensation. As they descended, all the emotions came crashing into Bucky in a growing storm, the terror, the confusion, the loathing, the impossible hope; his chest was a balloon blown up to twice its size. By the time they got to their door, he was shaking.

Steve fumbled the key into the lock with one hand, his other still blazing in Bucky's. He kicked the door shut behind them and sat Bucky at the kitchen table. Still hanging on, he stretched to the sink, their arms and linked hands forming a chain across the kitchen, and drew a glass of tap water. He set it in front of Bucky. “Drink up,” he commanded, and Bucky got half of it down, the rest slopping on the table and over his chin as his hand trembled uncontrollably.

“Okay,” Steve said, “it's okay,” and steadied the glass for Bucky, then helped him put it down. Tentative fingers stroked through Bucky's hair, and Bucky made a wounded noise and lurched half off the chair into Steve's touch. And Steve didn't pull away; he caught him up in his free arm and pulled him close, leaning in so they were both pressing desperately against each other, holding hands, Bucky's other arm slung, shaking, around the small of Steve's back, Steve cradling Bucky's head against his stomach. “God, Buck,” Steve said, and his even tone cracked, letting some of the agony spill out. Bucky shivered and shivered all the ice out of his veins in the warmth of Steve's body, as Steve's tender fingers smoothed down his hair.

After a while, as the trembling was subsiding somewhat, Steve urged Bucky out of the chair and into his bedroom. Together they stripped Bucky down to his underclothes, and Steve eased him down into the bed. Before Bucky's lips could even form the word “stay,” Steve had knelt on the floor next to the headboard, one of Bucky's hands clasped in both of his.

“I'm not going anywhere,” he promised.

Bucky rolled to the edge of the bed so he could press his face into Steve's neck. Steve tugged their interlocked hands to his birdlike chest and held them there.

“It's okay, Buck,” he said. “I swear. You're gonna be just fine. I'm here and you're gonna be okay.” And he leaned forward and pressed a long, tender kiss to Bucky's forehead.

A single sob broke out of Bucky. He bit down on his lip, but now that the trembling was almost gone, a silent trickle of tears started and did not stop, streaming relentlessly: the first hole in the dam.

“Steve,” Bucky said. “Did we – were we –”

Steve tightened his hold on Bucky's hand. “Yeah. We did. We were.”

“Then – could you stand to hold me?”

Wordlessly and without hesitation, Steve climbed into bed with Bucky and pulled him into his arms.

Another sob tore loose, and Bucky finally began to cry in earnest. At Hydra, Bucky had cried himself to sleep more times than he cared to count; he'd learned to do it silently, or he'd draw mockery or punishment. Now he lay in his own bed and sobbed out ugly, aching sobs that felt like they were tearing out pieces of him deep inside. Eventually the wracking tears petered out into a trickle, which died down into a sniffle, until Bucky lay exhausted and empty; and the entire time Steve soothed him, and stroked him, and held him to his chest.

 

 

Morning sunlight crept up the bed, pricking Bucky's aching eyes. Mumbling his discontent, he nuzzled his face deeper into his pillow. He drifted in a pleasant half-wakefulness, warm and cozy under the rumpled blankets. He'd have to get up sooner or later – if it wasn't too humiliating to face Steve after soaking through his shirt like that.

Steve. Bucky's hand, drifting idly over to the other side of the bed, met nothing but cool sheets. Bucky patted around the empty space for a moment, like an idiot. Then his eyes snapped open. He was alone in the room. Even as he sat bolt upright, launched into full alertness, he was already reassuring himself; Steve had probably woken up and needed a piss. Nothing more sinister than that.

Bucky rose to his feet. The fresh morning light poured in through the thin white curtains, painting the walls luminescent gold. The floorboards creaked under Bucky's feet as he padded to the bedroom door.

Steve wasn't in the kitchen, either. The lights were off, and a thin beam of pale light fell onto the table from the narrow window chute above the sink. In the gloom, the steady noise of the wall clock underscored the silence: tick tock, tick tock. Bucky ran a hand through his hair, then again, telling himself not to be crazy. There were a thousand good, innocuous reasons for Steve to be gone.

As he was passing into the living room, he spotted a piece of paper on the tabletop, lying half in the pool of light. It read, in Steve's precise handwriting: _Gone to corner store for eggs. -S_

There! There had been no need to be crazy after all. Bucky returned the note to the table. Steve would be back any minute.

Bucky trotted down the hallway to the bathroom. He was half-expecting Steve to have returned by the time Bucky let himself back into their apartment, but the place was, if anything, more silent than before. Well, he might as well get ready. He changed out of his pajamas into black trousers and a soft blue shirt. As the suspenders snapped into place over his shoulders, he reflected that these old clothes weren't so bad after all. You got used to them.

Steve was still gone. Dressed but with nowhere to go, Bucky snagged _Pirates of Venus_ off the bedside table and took it across the silent apartment to the living room. He switched on the lamp next to an ugly yellow armchair that was so ragged that stuffing sprayed out the seams, and the seat and back cushions were nothing more two huge rough worn patches. When Bucky curled up in it, a spring jabbed into his thigh. Why did they keep half this stuff? Under the lamplight, he ran his fingertips over the book's lined, faded cover. It created no resonance in his mind, no persistent tug of memory. All the damage told him this book had been well-read, but it was like he was holding someone else's beloved possession. There was no muscle memory to tell him the hands that had thumbed the pages had been his own.

He started at the title page. _Love, Steve._

It was an engrossing read. He had just gotten to good part when he rubbed at his eyes, and in doing so glanced at his watch, and almost lost his grip on the book in shock. He had been reading for over half an hour.

An icy flower blossomed in his stomach.

Where the hell was Steve? Was this corner store even in New York?

Bucky tossed on the book on the couch. He jogged to the coathook in the kitchen, banging his hip against the table in his hurry, cursing the 1930s and their lack of cell phones – he was gonna search every store from here to Chicago, find Steve, then punch him – he was shrugging on his dark wool jacket when he stopped. What if nothing had happened? Bucky had told Steve some horrible truths about the kind of person his friend had been. Maybe Steve had been lying the night before, lying about his forgiveness, holding Bucky and stroking him with secret hatred, faking just to lull the monster before he made his escape--

Bucky stood clutching his lapel. Then he yanked his jacket on and went out the door. He knew Steve. He was stupidly brave, he always did what was right, he couldn't lie for shit: pick one, and Steve wouldn't have tricked him. Maybe Steve's forgiveness was wrongheaded, but if it hadn't been genuine, he would have told it to Bucky straight.

In the hallway, Bucky snagged a kid who was wandering around, and got the information that the likeliest store was Neil's, just a short walk down Oak. Bucky strode out into the crisp morning and hurried up the sidewalk, shoving past anyone who didn't hop aside fast enough. Neil's sported a chaotic storefront with stack upon stack of crates of produce spilling over each other lined up along the sidewalk, and rows of white boards declaring FRESH ROASTED COFFEE DAILY! ALL KINDS OF SALADS! and the like. Bucky pushed his way inside. A little bell tinkled above the door.

A fellow with a truly impressive handlebar mustache was manning the checkout counter, ringing up a lady drowning in her fur wrap. Bucky elbowed her out of the way. “Hi,” he said. “Mister, uh, Neil?”

The man stared at him.

“Have you seen my friend?” Bucky put his hand up to shoulder height. “He's about this tall, yellow hair, goes by Steve?”

The man and the lady exchanged baffled glances.

“He might have been fighting someone,” Bucky tried.

The man's expression cleared up. “Oh, you mean the Rogers boy,” he said. “Sure, he was here.”

“I must have just missed him,” Bucky said, relieved.

“Oh, no.” The man shook his head. “He was in maybe an hour ago. Just picked up some eggs and left, if I recall.”

A cold fog settled over Bucky. “Thanks,” he heard himself say. He wandered out of the store in a haze of fear. He braced his hand against the wall and took several slow, deep breaths. He couldn't panic. If he panicked, he couldn't think. And anything could have happened. It didn't have to be dire. Steve was probably punching the living daylights out of some bully and lost track of time, what with all the fun he was having.

Bucky set off back the way he'd come, glancing into all the shops and restaurants and alleys he passed, just in case. And then in one alleyway he spotted something white and crumpled, lying on the ground near a dumpster.

He didn't run. He strolled over calmly as his heart rate crescendoed. It was a carton of eggs, tossed on the ground, weeping fresh yolk.

Bucky scanned the alleyway. “Steve?” he called.

Only silence answered.

He poked his head into the dumpster. He searched the alley and the street it emptied into. When Steve didn't manifest, he went through every alleyway between Neil's and the apartment, and then he went further up Oak and looked around there, and then he broadened his parameters to include other streets in the area. And there was nothing.

After an hour, he made his way back to the apartment. His hands were clammy and his breathing shallow. Steve had to be at home. They'd missed each other and he was there, waiting for Bucky to show up. And if he wasn't, then Bucky would get to a phone and call his ma, and Parsons, and any other place Steve might be visiting, and then if that didn't pan out, Bucky would call the police.

He dashed up to the fourth floor and burst into the apartment. Then he sagged against the doorjamb as his mouth flooded with cold. The railroad layout made it impossible to miss; Bucky could see straight through to the fire escape, and Steve wasn't home.

The door across the hallway squeaked open. Mrs. Walsh emerged, fussing over her lapel. When she spotted Bucky, her lips pursed. “Mr. Barnes,” she said. “Can you _believe_ the news?”

“The news?” he mumbled.

“Why, it was the talk of the station this morning.”

Somewhere in Bucky's head, an alarm bell started ringing. He pushed himself off the doorframe, alert now. “What happened?”

Mrs. Walsh came with her heels clacking across the floorboards. “That nasty man who broke into your place, he escaped last night.”

Bucky's heart stopped beating.

“He killed two officers on the way out, fine officers, such a tragedy,” someone was saying, somewhere far away.

God. It all fell into place. Rumlow staked out the building. Saw Steve come out. Tailed him to the corner store. Laid an ambush in a dark alley. Leapt out at Steve, dragged him back into the shadows, hand over his mouth so he couldn't scream, and the eggs fell from Steve's hands – as Bucky _slept_ –

“You really are a fine young man, and it would do you a world of good to reconsider your connections.” Mrs. Walsh was blathering on as though anything she had to say had any importance anymore. “I'm sure that evil man has something to do with the riffraff you hang around with—”

Bucky shut the door in her face.

Then he fell against the wall and slid to the floor, numb, his mind and body a blank.

Steve was dead.

There was no way to deny it. Steve was dead thirty seconds after Rumlow snatched him into that alleyway. Why would Rumlow waste any time killing and dumping him? Steve was the anchor, and with him destroyed, Rumlow could get about the business of reshaping history to his liking. Rumlow was loose, and Steve was dead.

 

 

Bucky sat in an anesthetized nothingness. He surveyed the empty, forlorn apartment with eerie calm, waiting for the white fog to sweep him away, as it had before. It never came. Within the shroud of numbness, his mind was sharp, and a volcanic pressure was growing and growing.

 

 

Bucky strode out into Brooklyn.

His thoughts were a black pit. He took all the money out from the savings jar – he was trapped here but that didn't matter now. Nothing mattered now. At the nearest hardware store, he bought several boxes of .45s. He filched a Colt M1911 that he couldn't afford and it was easy, so easy. They could have stolen a gun before. They'd placed so much importance on both of them getting away clean, as if _Bucky's_ future were of any consequence. Bucky should have gunned Rumlow down in the hallway. Steve would be furious, but he'd be alive.

The world had narrowed down to one imperative. Bucky would hunt Rumlow to the ends of the earth. No matter what it took, he'd destroy him, and then Bucky would fall apart, like an old ruin finally crumbling into dust.

 

 

A leaden dusk was shrouding the city. The streetlights sputtered on. Bucky went back to the apartment on Oak, even though a part of him yearned to find his ma and fall into her arms. He had planning to do, and – there was no point letting himself get attached now.

The apartment was still and quiet. Bucky closed the door behind him with a dull click, too loud in the sepulchral silence. His book lay on the couch where he'd tossed it that morning, and on the table stood the glass Steve had steadied for him last night, with a little water still puddled at the bottom. He set the gun on the table with a thunk. The resolute sense of purpose that had been carrying Bucky suddenly drained out of him, leaving him tired and empty. He wandered into the kitchen and stood there, lost. Now that he was here, it seemed impossible. How could he sleep in the same bed where Steve had held him?

He was staring blankly at the windows into the bedroom when one of the gauzy white curtains fluttered.

“Steve?” Bucky said. He raced through the bedroom door, and his burst of wild hope died to gray despair. The bedroom was as empty as everywhere else. The curtains were only stirring, like restless ghosts, in the draft from the open window.

Bucky cocked his head.

Why was the window open?

Bucky crossed the room and leaned through the window's black maw. He squinted into the icy wind that tore at his hair, his hands braced on the peeling windowsill. The fire escape stood empty. On the street below, people were rushing through the lowering night, huddling into themselves for warmth.

Bucky drew back and closed the window. It slid shut with a whispering noise.

When he turned around, he saw it.

The night they'd ambushed Rumlow, they'd placed a flaxen-haired wig on Bucky's pillow so that Rumlow would be lured in, thinking it was Steve. Bucky had swept it off his bed before going to sleep, and it had been lying on the floor ever since.

It was sitting in the center of his bed now, wadded up in a ball of gold. Next to it was a note.

Bucky picked up the note with numb fingers.

It read, in spiky black handwriting:

_At midnight, he dies._

Below that was an address: 1404 Alameda Avenue.

Bucky sank down on the bed, looking at the paper in his hand in blind incomprehension. If – he crushed the crazy hope trying to surge up inside him – _if_ Steve was alive, then none of this made any sense. Sure, Rumlow had plenty of reason to lure Bucky somewhere dark and lonely; maybe he wanted put Bucky down for good, or planned to present the Winter Soldier raw material to Zola. But Rumlow knew how meticulously Hydra had trained their Soldier. Bucky wouldn't approach close enough to lay a finger on unless he had proof of life. So if Rumlow expected this to work as anything more than a cruel prank, Steve had to be _living_ bait; and why risk it?

Especially since – Bucky checked the note. “At midnight.” Today was their fifth day in 1937. If the anchor was safe, it was the last day before time reset and they all snapped back to 2016. Would that happen at midnight if Steve was still alive? The risk was too great for Rumlow to throw away his one shot at victory on. He had no reason, no reason at all, not to have killed Steve hours ago.

Unless.

In his mind's eye, Bucky saw the lab at Chronos Enterprises. There was Rumlow, rising from the hostages, drawing the rod from his coat, aiming it at Steve. There was Bucky, flinging himself into the lightning's path.

The alleyway. Rumlow had gone after Steve. Hadn't he? Except Bucky had put himself in front of Steve like a shield, and he'd been the person Rumlow had attacked.

And in the apartment, he remembered the awful moment that Rumlow, after seeing their Steve simulacrum in the bed, had turned back from the doorknob trap, maybe to search the apartment for someone else – because Steve wasn't who he had come for after all –

Bucky crumpled the note in his fist.

Rumlow had known it all along. Steve wasn't the anchor.

Bucky was.

 

 

Choosing to go was no choice at all.

He could have asked Mrs. Walsh to call the police for him, but he knew Rumlow. If he so much as smelled a rat, he'd cut Steve's throat and run. No, Bucky was going, and he was going alone. Now all he had to do was get there.

Bucky ransacked the apartment, scrabbling through every single drawer or cupboard in search of a map. He found a pair of pliers and threw them on the table. After he'd trashed the place, he gave up in despair. Of course a city map was something two born-and-raised Brooklynites disdained to own. Not that Bucky could remember, but he doubted he'd ever anticipated he might time-travel back to Oak Street as an amnesiac assassin in need of directions.

He didn't have time for this. Back in the quinjet, that scientist had said those previous time travelers hadn't effected permanent change in the past, but they still remembered what they'd done – and that meant that maybe what happened to _them_ in the past had consequences, even once time reset. So it wasn't a matter of keeping himself out of trouble until midnight. He had to get to Steve. He had to get to Steve right now.

Bucky dropped into a kitchen chair and pressed his hands into his face. He'd have to go knocking on doors for directions. Although. 1404 Alameda. It was familiar; it carried that resonance. He ground the heel of his palms into his eyes. Alameda. The images drifted up from the dark; stern brick warehouses, the growling of delivery trucks – yeah, that was right, it was a rundown industrial area near the waterfront. He could take a tram there.

Then Bucky spilled a box of .45s on the kitchen table, grabbed up the pliers, and began to pry the bullets apart.

 

 

The building on Alameda was a dilapidated old slaughterhouse hulking in the darkness of an empty, fenced-off lot. What glass remained in the windows was crusted with grime, and weeds sprouted richly in the shadows along the base of its weatherbeaten brick walls. It looked like the Depression had killed it some years ago, and its corpse had been left to rot ever since.

It was after eleven pm, and Bucky was on the roof with a bomb.

During his reconnaissance, he'd found the front door that an idiot would use. He'd also discovered a few secondary exits and a loading bay, which professionally trained idiots would use. Bucky, on the other hand, slung his bag over his shoulder and scaled the brick facade all the way up to the roof. Once there, he unscrewed the grating of a ventilation shaft and wormed his way inside.

He dropped out of the shaft into an old office and landed atop the desk. A layer of dust puffed up around his feet, dimly visible in the weak light filtering in through the dirt-caked windows. Papers lay scattered in ghostly impression on the floor. Bucky padded to the doorway, where he stopped, pressed flat against the wall. He scanned the hallway: empty.

Bucky crept through the dusty, abandoned halls without finding a soul.

The maze of industrial office space opened up into a murky storage room stacked high with haphazard pyramids of crates. This room gave Bucky pause. He stopped in the darkness of the hallway, listening intently for anyone lying in wait somewhere in the chaos. Eventually, all senses on alert, he picked his way over to the tightly switchbacked metal staircase that led up to a second-story catwalk. The catwalk was interrupted by a door recessed into deep shadow. Bucky slipped through that on silent feet.

The door opened onto a hall of slaughter.

The walls stretched for a hundred yards, inset with twin lines of high, grubby, shattered windows marching the length of the hall. A catwalk ringed the walls, receding into the gloom that gathered at the other end of the space; the couple of bridges between the two walls caught the light in that empty expanse of darkness, glittering eerily.

Suspended from the ceiling were two long lines of huge, evil-looking meat hooks. Each hook dangled a little more than a man's height above the floor, which was punctured at regular intervals by dark-stained drains. This would have been where they hung the cattle and went about their grisly work.

Rumlow was sitting in a chair between the lines of hooks, one leg crossed casually over the other, the red ember of a cigarette flaring at his lips. A gas lantern at his feet carved a golden sphere of luminescence out of the darkness. At the edge of the light, hanging by his bound wrists from one of the vicious hooks, was Steve.

Watching him, Bucky was able to draw in a full breath for the first time all day; and, at the same time, a fresh new fuse of anger ignited in his stomach. Steve was breathing, but he was unconscious, his head flopped against his chest. Purple bruising mottled his face, and blood dripped steadily from his parted lips to the slaughterhouse floor.

Bucky was going to kill Rumlow very soon.

This was the trickiest part of his hastily cobbled-together plan, made trickier by the fact that he had the general idea but was having to improvise the specifics on the spot. Bucky knelt on the catwalk, working in perfect silence, invisible in the shadows. He kept his eyes glued on Rumlow the whole time – and Rumlow never looked up. Gently, so gently, Bucky reached into his bag and pulled out a capped metal pipe with a length of alcohol-soaked twine hanging out of it. He set the pipe down on the catwalk very carefully; after all, it was filled with all the gunpowder looted from a box's worth .45-caliber bullets.

Down below, Rumlow shifted. Bucky froze. He risked a glance over the catwalk; Rumlow was just lighting up a new cigarette, eyes downward, unsuspecting. Bucky let out a silent breath.

Next, Bucky pulled out a small bottle of vodka, opened it, and set it on its side, so that the liquid burbled noiselessly out without any splashing sounds. It formed a spreading pool that engulfed the twine.

That done, Bucky disappeared back down into the storage room, unnoticed, and his hands began to shake a little from the terror of everything that could have gone wrong.

And now, it was finally time to end this.

Bucky sidled up to the ground-level entrance into the slaughter hall and pressed his back against the wall of the storage room. “Rumlow?” he called.

The sound came of a chair scraping back, and Rumlow's feet thumped on the floor. “There you are,” he said, self-satisfied. “I was beginning to think you'd stood me up.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. God, what an asshole. “I'm here to make a trade.”

Rumlow's footsteps paced closer to the door. “Come on out.” Then, with amusement: “I promise not to shoot you.”

Yeah. Sure. Believable. Bucky called, “I'll come out, but first you have to send Steve in here. Alive,” he added pointedly. “And Rumlow, he'd better have all his fingers, I swear to God.”

“Yeah, yeah. Keep your socks on.”

Rumlow's footsteps receded closer to where Bucky's memory told him Steve was hanging. Bucky risked edging around the doorframe so he could watch Rumlow dragging his chair over to Steve's small, battered body on its creaking hook. Once he was up on the chair, Rumlow seized Steve's delicate wrists in his huge, rough hands, hauled him up off the hook, and dumped him unceremoniously to the floor. Steve crashed into a bony heap. He emitted a weak, barely-conscious moan. Bucky's hands curled into fists.

Rumlow crouched down next to Steve's limp form. He cut a huge swath of shadow in the pool of lamplight, and darkness fell across Steve's body. Rumlow slapped him lightly round the face. “Hey, wake up. C'mon, Cap, rise and shine.”

Steve groaned. One of his elbows dragged across the concrete floor as he brought his bound hands to his eyes. “Aw, fuck you,” he mumbled.

“Now, don't be like that,” Rumlow said. Steve was already getting up, trying to get one arm under him so he could lever his shoulders off the ground, but Rumlow preempted him, grabbing him by the collar and yanking him to his feet. Steve staggered before he caught his balance. He looked absurdly small, toy-sized, next to Rumlow. “Your buddy's here.”

Steve's tired gaze sharpened. “Bucky?”

“Got any other buddies who'd be hanging around?” Rumlow placed a hand between Steve's shoulderblades and shoved him toward the storage room. “Go on. Show him I left all ten fingers on.”

Steve cast Rumlow a sour, unimpressed look over his shoulder as he went, which did Bucky's heart a world of good to see. The moment he passed into the storage room, Bucky grabbed him and pulled him into the thick shadows under the crates.

“You're not the anchor,” Bucky whispered. He slipped the knife out of his sleeve and started sawing at the ropes that bound Steve's wrists.

“Thanks, I got that,” Steve whispered back. “That's why you shouldn't be here.”

Bucky shook his head. “I have to go out there.”

Even as he said it, Rumlow called, mildly, “Soldier, if you're not out here in ten seconds, I'm coming in there for both of you.”

“I'm not leaving,” Steve whispered furiously. Even as little more than a silhouette in the dimness, he managed to look immovably stubborn.

Steve hissed as Bucky tugged the severed ropes away from his raw wrists. “I know,” Bucky said quietly. “I know you aren't. But you have to let me go out there alone.” He brought out the last item from his bag, and pressed it into Steve's hand: a penicillin syringe he'd recovered from their apartment. “You just have to trust me.”

Steve's fingers closed over the syringe. “I trust you.”

Midnight was approaching.

Bucky walked alone into the pool of lamplight. Rumlow stood at the edge, half in shadow; he held his gun casually against his leg. His gaze swept Bucky up and down. “It's good for a laugh,” he drawled. “Seeing you dressed up like a person.”

Bucky was silent.

Rumlow shrugged. “Alright then. Let's get it over with.” He raised his gun.

“Wait,” Bucky said.

Rumlow paused, and he watched Bucky pull the battered pack of smokes from his rooftop hideaway out of his pocket. Bucky tapped a cigarette into his palm.

“Got a light?” he asked. “For old times' sake?”

Rumlow checked his watch. Then he chuckled and shook his head. “Sure. We've got time for your last cigarette. I owe you one for 1990.” He dug his lighter out of his pocket. “They make some funny-ass lighters here,” he said, and tossed it through the circle of lamplight. It glittered as it fell.

Bucky caught it easily in one hand. It was different, but his fingers knew the shape of it. The trembling flame flickered to life, setting the inside of his hand warmly aglow as he cupped it around the cigarette, a small private light. He took a drag.

“Thanks,” he said, “you fucking psychopath.”

He hurled the lighter on to the catwalk.

Hydra had changed many things in Bucky: they'd made him stronger, quicker to heal, and harder to kill. But long before he'd been molded into the Winter Soldier, Bucky had always had perfect aim.

The lighter arced like a falling star through the blackness. The flame landed directly in the pool of alcohol. There was a moment of crazy conflagration that threw orange firelight on Rumlow's shocked face, and then the fire hit the soaked twine, and Bucky's pipe bomb exploded.

The metal of catwalk screeched as it tore itself apart and came crashing to the ground; shrapnel flew; the windows screamed and blew out, raining glass like daggers. The shockwave bowled both of them over. Bucky hit the ground hard, cracked his elbow, bit back his scream; he struggled to his feet. Rumlow had knocked into the lantern and it was rolling wildly on its side, sending shadows spinning and flashing over the walls. Bucky found Rumlow pushing himself to his knees in the chaotic flickering light, and he drew his stolen gun from his belt. He braced his feet and fired – and at the last second, Rumlow jerked to the side. The bullet clipped his shoulder.

Bucky swore. Rumlow was on his feet now, and moving; Bucky fired at him four times, bang bang bang bang, and missed every time as the lantern rolled and Rumlow swerved in and out of darkness.

Rumlow disappeared into the shadows.

Biting his lip, listening hard, Bucky backed up toward the storage room to guard the door, his gun up in both hands – and then he caught the tiniest flash of movement in the shadows, and he whipped to the side and fired.

The bullet flew true. Rumlow dropped his gun, his hand a mangled wreck of gore hanging off his wrist, with a bullet hole in the exact middle.

He melted back into the shadows, bleeding, as Steve stepped up to his side. He had a grim smile on his battered face.

“You know, Bucky, you haven't changed at all,” he said. “You do still like a fun night out.”

The next moment they broke apart, as a meat hook came swinging out of the darkness. It scythed through the space between them.

“Sure, Cap,” came Rumlow's voice, full of sarcasm. Bucky fired, missed; the echoing hall made the sound hard to trace. “ _Bucky_ hasn't changed at all.”

Steve dodged a hook that whistled past him.

“But you didn't see _Bucky_ snapping little old ladies' necks like I did.”

The next hook came screaming by so quickly it brushed the hair on Bucky's head. He fired into the darkness. Missed.

“And you didn't see _Bucky_ sobbing and pissing himself in the chair, like a pathetic little bitch.”

Bucky's hands were flexing uncontrollably on the grip of his gun.

“Don't listen to him,” Steve hissed.

“But then again,” Rumlow mused, “he didn't see _you_ , Cap, playing make-believe all those years. The Avengers, STRIKE, the stars and stripes... you think you fooled us into thinking you'd fit in?” A hook struck a glancing blow to Bucky's shoulder; he grunted in pain. At the edge of the lantern light, Steve looked stricken. “You stupid enough to believe you belong? Sorry, man, you're a dinosaur – just waiting to go extinct.”

Bucky fired one more luckless shot.

There was a pause.

“That's eight,” Rumlow said, and leaped out of the darkness.

Bucky's useless gun dropped as Rumlow struck him full force. Rumlow knocked him to the ground and ground the heel of his boot into Bucky's palm until something snapped. Bucky screamed. Rumlow laughed, kicked him brutally in the ribs, and as Bucky cried out, again in the chin, snapping his head back, sending stars exploding in his vision. He lay dazed, cursing himself, dimly, for having been played like a fool, as Rumlow clambered atop him and fastened his good hand around Bucky's throat.

Steve ran at them. This time, Rumlow batted him away, easy as swatting a fly. Steve struck the ground hard and lay there gasping.

Bucky's vision was growing faint. Rumlow was squeezing so hard the bones in his neck were creaking.

Then, suddenly, Rumlow's grip slackened.

“What the hell?” he said thickly. He took his hand off Bucky's throat.

Bucky sucked in a desperate breath and coughed so hard he had to curl up on his aching side. As he rolled, he saw, gleaming in the lamplight, the metal syringe that Steve had left sticking out of Rumlow's back.

“1990,” Bucky rasped.

Rumlow stared at him, his breath coming in wheezing gasps. He reached over his shoulder and found the syringe.

“Oh, fuck,” he said.

Bucky said, “I owed you one.”

Rumlow rose, scowling, as if to kick Bucky again. Bucky flinched away. But instead, Rumlow stumbled, and then collapsed.

Steve was sitting up now. Bucky hurt, all over, abominably; over the next few minutes he managed to roll onto his knees, and then push himself upright, as Rumlow's gasping and wheezing became agonized.

Bucky looked up. Rumlow was sprawled in the lantern light, his features swelling, his breathing tortured. But his eyes were sharp as they bored into Bucky.

“You gonna... let me die... like this?” he gasped.

Bucky shook his head. “No.” He crawled slowly, painfully over to Rumlow, and took out his knife. “I'll be kinder to you than you were to me. I'll give you an easy death.” He slid the knife cleanly through Rumlow's ribs and into his heart. “That's all I ever wanted.”

Bucky staggered to his feet. Rumlow lay dead below him, and all he felt was empty.

“Bucky,” Steve called, from where he had crawled near the lantern, “Bucky,” but Bucky ignored him. He didn't think he could look at Steve with Rumlow's words still echoing in his battered brain. _Never belong_. He picked up his gun from where it had fallen, rummaged in his pockets and got a single bullet out. Loaded it. Chambered the round.

“Bucky?” Steve said.

Bucky glanced over at Rumlow's watch. Four minutes to midnight. There was still time.

He put the gun to his own head.

Steve shot to his feet, aches and pains forgotten. He put his hands out: stop. Standing at the opposite edge of that small sphere of light in the darkness, Steve said, “Bucky, no.”

Bucky shook his head. His hair scraped against the barrel. “Steve, it's okay. It's for the best.”

“I don't follow,” Steve said.

“You can stay here,” Bucky told him. “There's nothing stopping you now. You can...” He searched Steve's stricken face, begging him to understand. “You can go to war, and do it better this time. Really get rid of Hydra. Make the world a better place.”

Steve said, simply, “But you'd be dead.” He took a step into the glowing pool of light.

Bucky backed up into the shadows. His voice cracked as he said, “That boy you knew. He died anyway.” He paused, and forced the rest out: “Maybe he deserved to.”

Steve came slowly past the lantern. “I don't believe that's true. And...” He studied Bucky's face. “Neither do you.”

Bucky kept backing away as something hot and wet rose in his throat, and the gun was cold on his burning face, and he could feel his racing heartbeat where he was clutching the grip. Blood rushed through his veins. He was alive; he had prayed for death so many times. He had lain awake hating himself for not being strong enough to die, when that would be what was best for Steve, who had no idea what Bucky had done to him – except now he did know, and he was still walking across the light, his face full of fear and love. “What's wrong with you,” Bucky cried. “This is what you wanted. You can go _home_.”

"No," Steve said. "Not without you.”

Bucky broke open. He let out a wet, gasping sob, and lowered the gun.

Somewhere in Brooklyn, a bell tolled midnight, and they were gone.

 

 

“-- _out!_ ”

He was in a curtain of blinding white light, lunging forward at a dark figure – Rumlow! – and then Rumlow went slack, strings cut, slumping into a boneless heap on the floor. The light flared and died. Bucky brought himself up short, staggering forward. His skin was tingling as through an electrical current had just passed through him.

He blinked stars out of his eyes. The computer readout station in the center of the lab blinked and hummed. The frightened hostages were huddled against the wall, staring. Natasha was coming to a halt, stopped from flinging herself into the fray when the fray disappeared, a startled expression on her face. The rod lay near Rumlow's limp, outstretched hand, the last of the white light dying down between its dials.

And behind him--

Bucky turned around.

There was Steve, the shield on the ground beside him. He was staring right at Bucky, open devastation on his face.

“Bucky,” he croaked.

Bucky crossed to him in one long stride and folded him into his arms. They sank down to the concrete floor, clutching at each other, the back of Steve's brown jacket crumpling in Bucky's fists. He tucked his face into Steve's neck, breathing in the smell of clean skin, feeling Steve's heartbeat thrum against his cheek. One of Steve's hands came up and stroked through Bucky's hair.

“I've got you,” Steve was murmuring, “I've got you.”

“What was that?” Sam said into their earpieces. “Steve? Nat? What's happening?”

Natasha said, “Something I can neither explain nor describe.”

Bucky took a shuddering breath and pulled away. He gripped Steve's broad shoulder with his metal hand and touched Steve's face with his right, stroking down over his cheekbones and jaw, feeling his strength, the solidity of his bones. “Look at you,” Bucky mumbled. “You're enormous.”

Steve laughed wetly. “Sure am. And I eat like a horse.”

Bucky rubbed his thumb over Steve's ear, and Steve's eyes slid closed. His eyelashes sparkled with dew. Bucky pressed his forehead into Steve's temple. “It's okay, pal,” he said. “We made it. We both made it.”

After the rest – after untying the hostages, waiting with them for emergency services, after Steve had given his earnest and heavily redacted statement to the police, after Bucky watched the blank-faced black-suited agents from the CIA's Hydra taskforce zip Rumlow into a body bag – they got to go home. Natasha had called the rest of the Avengers to say that the situation was in hand, so it was just the three of them and Sam that finally climbed into the quinjet parked at Stark Tower. Steve and Bucky sat together, pressed into each other's sides; Steve radiated warmth through his civvies.

Sam and Natasha sat across from them, staring. Natasha had a speculative gleam in her eye, her arms loosely crossed. “So, boys,” she said, “where've you been?”

“Tell you later,” Steve said.

Bucky closed his eyes and lost himself in the rise and fall of Steve's breathing against his body.

When they landed at the facility, a light snowfall was sifting down from the overcast sky. Sam and Natasha trotted across the landing pad, but Bucky hung back at the foot of the quinjet ramp. Up ahead, Sam got the door open, and warm light spilled out onto the pearly dusting of snow. Natasha disappeared inside, brushing off her shoulders. Before he followed her in, Sam looked back. He raised an eyebrow and tilted his head at the glowing interior of the facility; an invitation. Bucky smiled and shook his head.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve said.

Bucky looked over. Steve stood on the landing pad, hands in his pockets, his hair and shoulders sweetly sprinkled with white flakes of snow.

“Hey, stranger,” Bucky said. Steve's eyes crinkled up. “Feel like seeing my place?”

They trudged into the woods where Bucky had stashed his motorcycle what felt like ages ago. It was just as he'd left it, under a sweeping fallen pine branch; of course, as strange as it seemed, he'd only hidden it there that morning. Steve walked the bike to the road for him, admiring it and peppering him with questions about its performance and upkeep and how long Bucky had had it and whether he thought it might be better than Steve's own bike.

By the time they got on the road, the snow was drifting down thickly through the still, calm air. They rode over the powdered streets, the crystalline air cold on Bucky's face, Steve's arms warm around his waist. The sky was emptying the last of winter out of itself; the world had turned white and foreign, but Bucky knew where he was going.

Steve helped Bucky wheel the bike to his shed. Their footsteps crunched through the crisp snowdrifts. “You have a house,” Steve said, in delight, and Bucky replied, “Yeah, but I'm pretty fucked up, so I live in the attic,” and he took Steve up. He was strong again now, and it was easy as breathing – easier, some days – to leap up to the trapdoor and haul himself inside.

He climbed up first to check that everything was okay. Yes, here it was, undisturbed, his home – the shuttered windows, the spartan furniture, the bare beams crossing overhead. His lonely mattress lay empty on the floor. Bucky crossed to the window and opened the shutters, suffusing the room with a soft wintry glow. Bucky's shoulders relaxed in relief. This was his home. It was the place he'd found for himself where he could feel a measure of safety. At the same time, he felt an unexpected wave of melancholy. This bare attic was so different from his and Steve's cramped apartment on Oak Street, or the comfortable chaos at his ma's; it had been a strange blessing to discover those places, and he would never see them again.

Then Steve heaved his torso out of the trapdoor. With his legs dangling in the hallway, he took in the austerity, his eyebrows raised. “Bucky,” he said seriously, “I'm worried you're living beyond your means,” and abruptly this attic wasn't so different after all.

Steve climbed into the room and straightened up, looking around with interest. Studying him evoked a jarring sense of dissonance in Bucky. Steve had been colossal even when he was small, but now that fine-boned boy was gone, and he had a body to match his towering spirit. In the pale light, with its white luster in his hair, Steve was beautiful as a distant mountain. And for the first time since he'd been transported back to the lab, Bucky let himself be flooded with the awareness of the body he'd gotten back – and the phantom of the one he lost. He was strong again, yeah. He was weaponized. He was no longer the sweet-faced boy he'd been. His body had been changed, cut open, debased; his hands were soaked in blood; he had a sunburst of ugly red scarring radiating from the inhuman monstrosity Hydra had grafted to him.

“I'm a mess, Steve,” Bucky said. Steve had drifted over to the mattress, studying the radio with an unidentifiable expression; he glanced up. Bucky leaned against the wall, tucking his hands up under his arms. The heavy solidity of the left one felt odd now.

Steve's mouth quirked. “That's okay. I think I'm kind of a mess too.”

Out the window, Bucky could glimpse the dark green of the living forest through the thick flurries of snow. Staring out at the storm, he said, “I'm the kind of broken that you can't put back to the way it was.”

“I don't want to go back.”

Bucky looked at Steve. They locked gazes. Steve's eyes were shaded the gray-blue of a winter sea; they were the same eyes that had looked out of his thin young face, the same eyes that Bucky had known when he didn't know his own name. Steve knew everything now: the worst things Bucky had ever done, the worst things that had ever happened to him, and the damage that could never be sanded away. And he was still here, filling up Bucky's lonely home.

“Okay,” Bucky said breathlessly, and they both came forward, and Steve took Bucky's face in his rough large hands, and kissed him. His hot wet mouth moved so sweetly on Bucky's; Bucky clutched at the small of his back and his head, cradling the delicate curve of his skull in his hand. Steve cupped his jaw as he deepened the kiss, stroking a tingling line down the arch of Bucky's back. Then Steve pressed Bucky up against the wall, one hand coming up to brace himself alongside Bucky's head as he molded his body to Bucky's, his skin heat blazing through their clothes, his other thumb rubbing at the pulse leaping in Bucky's throat. Steve was solid and warm and alive in his arms, and Bucky realized that he was whimpering into Steve's mouth, but he couldn't make himself stop.

Every touch was exquisite and excruciating. Bucky's nerves sang with electricity everywhere Steve was pressed against, and an urgent heat was pooling in his belly; as good as it felt, the intensity scared him. He had been starving for touch for so long that the flood was overwhelming – and, even now, his skin still remembered Hydra and the table.

Bucky broke away. “Okay, okay,” he gasped. Steve smiled dumbly at him, heavy-eyed and open-mouthed, his lips as red and swollen as Bucky's felt, and Bucky muttered “Fuck,” and stumbled back into Steve for more. After a few more minutes he wiggled out of Steve's embrace again. “Okay. Oh, hell.”

They ended up turning the radio on and making dinner. Steve's hair was tousled beyond respectability, which was damnably adorable. Bucky only had one chair, so they ate on the floor under the window, although Steve joked it wasn't smart for men their age. After that Bucky put on a pot of coffee, brought out a deck of cards he'd bought but never opened and Steve taught him poker, then subsequently lost every single hand. They laughed and traded quick coffee-flavored kisses. It was the kind of evening Bucky wanted to have over and over again for a hundred years.

Night descended. The snow exhausted itself. They cracked the window to let the fresh cold breeze in, and it wafted in carrying the crisply sweet scents of snow and pine. High above, the wind scrubbed the stormclouds away, leaving a clean black slate of sparkling stars behind.

Bucky took Steve into his bed, and they held each other as they fell asleep.

 

 

_In Bucky's dream, he was a little boy. A bigger kid had him cornered by the fence, calling him names, pushing him to the ground every time Bucky tried to get back up. He was trying to be brave but fat hot tears were splashing down his cheeks, and his voice wobbled as he yelled, “Stop it, stop it!”_

_All of a sudden, a stick came sailing out of nowhere and thwacked the boy in the forehead. He howled and dropped back, clutching his face. Bucky barely had time to look over in amazement before an angry blur threw itself at the kid, shouting, “Bully! Go away!”_

_There was a brief, vicious, snarling scuffle. At the end of it, the bully turned tail and ran._

_Bucky stared up at his unlikely rescuer._

_Standing over him was a shrimp of a boy. Blood coated his chin, dribbling down from a split lip, which split further as he grinned at Bucky. “That showed him!” he said. “What a jerk!” He stuck out his hand. Tentatively, Bucky took it, and the kid pulled him to his feet._

_Bucky smeared the tears off his face with the back of his hand. “Thanks,” he said, wonderingly._

_The kid wiped his blond hair out of his eyes and shrugged as if to say it was all in a day's work. “You'll be alright now,” he said with undaunted confidence. “I'm gonna stick by you.”_

_And Bucky knew it was true._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is dedicated to [birdbrains](http://archiveofourown.org/users/birdbrains/pseuds/birdbrains), for all of her support, encouragement, helpful criticism, and excited recapping of parts she loved. This would probably still be languishing without you. A round of applause for [GreenKirtle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenKirtle/pseuds/GreenKirtle) as well please, for introducing me to _Pirates of Venus_.
> 
> A thousand thanks to my Big Bang artist, [sgtjimbarnes](http://sgtjimbarnes.tumblr.com/)/[AngelDibs](http://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelDibs), for her beautiful artwork, which you can see [here](http://sgtjimbarnes.tumblr.com/post/149669883981/bucky-steve-said-the-hard-edge-of-his-voice).
> 
> And finally, thank you to everyone who read all the way through, particularly since you had to read through so much flaying to get here. I mean... wow. That was gross. Anyway, if you enjoyed, please leave me a comment.
> 
> As always, you can find me on [my tumblr](http://ibroketuesday.tumblr.com/), where I am currently too tired to be crying.


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